


Technical Issues

by Braindepository



Category: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - All Media Types
Genre: Broadway, F/M, Post-Canon, Three Years Later, eventual Mike/Violet, eventually more characters, teeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeens, teens now oh no
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-12
Updated: 2017-11-07
Packaged: 2018-12-14 08:40:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 23,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11779464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Braindepository/pseuds/Braindepository
Summary: Now fifteen, Violet Beauregarde is living her best life (even if it is a little more purple than it used to be).  She's grown up.  So when she happens to bump into another ex-golden ticket winner, she's surprised to see that he hasn't.  Like, literally.  But why?  Google it.





	1. one

**Author's Note:**

> The characters here are based on the characters in the 2017 Broadway musical version of 'Charlie and The Chocolate Factory', and also I guess there may be some things that count as spoilers for that. Heavily inspired by the fact that the actors who play Mike and Violet on Broadway go on regular adorable Instagram friend-dates and are the cutest.

She's just about to reapply her lipstick when she hears a gasp and knows she has been recognized. Fifteen year old Violet Beauregarde turns and lets a dazzling smile spread across her face (the same smile that won her her Orbit contract). She cracks her gum. It's no longer the same piece, but the fans expect something. A little girl inches towards her, clutching an iPhone, and a gum wrapper. Violet whips out a purple sharpie and prepares to assume the selfie position.

"Hey girl, what's up! What's your name?" She coos, with practiced ease.

Once the girl has gone, and Violet is alone again in the airport bathroom, she turns back towards the wall-length mirror. The florescent lighting particularly brings out the vaguely purplish undertones in her skin, her little parting gift from Wonka. She reapplies a shimmery highlight along her cheekbone until it's absolutely vicious. Her lipstick is fine after all, but her curls are threatening to frizz and she twists them into a quick up-do. She strikes a pose, one hand on her curvy hip, the other on her collar bone. She blows her reflection a kiss. Perfect.

It's the second time today she's been recognized. It's a regular occurrence in airports and malls, less so back home in L.A., but everyone is recognizably someone in L.A., so to give people their privacy is just polite. Still, secretly (or maybe not so much?), she prefers this: the way people's faces light up when they realize they are in the same room as The Queen of Pop herself. Even if that room is a public bathroom. 

She's not at all ungrateful; doesn't take any of it for granted. She's more than aware that things could have turned out verrrrrrrry differently, had daddy been less talented at turning a devastating loss at the hands of a weird old man at an even weirder candy factory and a daughter with a newly purple shimmer to her formerly chocolate complexion into good press. The Queen of Pop, after all, simply would have had no interest in owning a candy factory that doesn't even make gum. It's like the papers said: she's nothing but happy for the Bucket boy. It's mostly even true.

(She only rarely finds herself feeling stung when she spies a Wonka-brand product. At having gone out the way she did, and so quickly. She could have beaten Bucket.) 

She gives herself one last look, before heading back to her father at their gate. Eugene knows how long girls spend in the bathroom, but even he has his limits, and it's embarrassing when he insists on hovering over her, even if she gets why he would. She's in high school now. She can use a bathroom. She's not going to explode of tap water, and hand santizer.

She's a few steps into the terminal, when she hears her name said in a hushed whisper. She turns to flash a smile over her shoulder (her left shoulder; her best side) and collides with a little boy who has his nose buried in his tablet. She squawks, but stays upright. He goes down, tablet, phone, and headphones clattering to the floor around him.

"Ohmygosh I am so sorry!" She says, offering the child her hand. And then she freezes, because he has paused in gathering his fallen electronics and glared up at her, and he isn't a child at all (at least, not any more than she is). Her mouth falls open. Her gum almost falls out.

She recognizes Mike Teavee immediately, because he has not changed. At all. He must be her age by now, maybe even a year older, but he still looks exactly like he did that day at Wonka's factory. He still has a childish, pre-teen's face. He's still the same height he was when she was twelve. He might even be shorter (although she probably only thinks that because she has grown to an average fifteen year old height. People don't get shorter).

"Whatever," he mutters, refusing her hand and getting to his feet. His voice is still high and prepubescent sounding.

"Mike," she finds herself saying almost accusingly. "You're Mike Teavee."

Mike is clearly not as at ease as her with being recognized. His eyes go wide with something like fear, and dart to either side, before he squeaks: 

"Who wants to know?"

And then:

"Whatever you heard, I didn't do it."

And then:

"And if I did it, you can't prove it."

"It's Violet Beauregarde," she tells him, looking down at him. She is initially disappointed that he has not recognized her, but, she supposes, she has changed, and he, like many teenage boys, is not likely to wear any of the perfume or make-up brands she is the fabulous face of (even if they could use the help, particularly in the smell department). His eyes widen further, and then narrow at her name, but he doesn't say anything.

"From the factory?" She continues, starting to get annoyed by his lack of response. And then it slips out before she can stop herself. "Why are you so little?"

She regrets it immediately as his whole body stiffens and his face clouds over like a thunderstorm.

"Why are you so purple," he spits back, and for the first time in years she feels self-conscious about it. It's part of her brand these days; the reason she was in Atlanta, and is now headed to Miami for an in-store appearance with Pop Color: a make-up line with a focus on super saturated pigments and diverse pallets. She isn't even that purple. It's like she has her own built-in filter, or a toned setting powder at most. It has helped to make her a figure of female empowerment, body acceptance, and also increasingly famous, because if there's one thing that sells these days, it's someone who looks different in an acceptable way. He has managed in five words to make her feel unacceptable. She looks away; hopes he does not notice how hard his words have landed.

"Wonka," she says. "Obviously."

"Obviously," he replies. When she looks back, his shoulders have un-tensed, and his face has settled back into something neutral; slightly cocky. He looks like he's about to say something else, when his mother sweeps in. Ethel Teavee looks more or less the same as well: like an extra on 'Leave It To Beaver' who found a bottle of gin hidden under the craft service table.

"He gets so cranky when we travel," she says of her son, as if he is still actually twelve, not just as short as someone who is. When both teenagers stare at her blankly, she looks honestly surprised that Mike's behavior requires no excuse. "Was he...he wasn't bothering you?"

In the time it takes her look towards Mrs. Teavee and tell her, "No...", Mike has already turned on his heel and started walking away from both of them. He has his phone out, and that has all of his attention.

"Oh," his mother says. "Well..." Before practically sprinting after her son. From where she stands, Violet can just hear the woman say: 

"Mikey? Were you...talking to a girl?"

Her voice is simultaneously incredulous and pleased. Mike's answer is as sullen as humanly possible.

"No, mom. Forget it, let's just go already."

Ethel's reply is lost in the din of the crowd, but Mike's high pitched voice carries.

"I'm not listening to you. ...I can't hear you. ...We're not...MO-OM..."

Violet makes her way back to her father. They board their plane. In Miami, she smiles in scores of photos with fans. She does not think about Mike Teavee.

...

...Until later, the next evening, when she is sitting on her hotel bed, picking at the remains of her room service. Her father is in his own, adjoining room, probably negotiating something, and she is idly checking her Instagram, when her mind wanders somewhere it hasn't for years. She looks up Augustus Gloop first. The German is still staunchly defending his eating championship titles (good for him). She looks up Veruca Salt next. The Russian girl appears to be attempting to single handed-ly out do every other rich kid of Instagram, as she poses on increasingly gilded yachts, ponies (yes, the ponies are gilded), and the arms of bored looking European aristocrats. Violet hesitates momentarily, before adding her.

Mike Teavee does not have an Instagram. His twitter is deleted. His Facebook is private. She turns to google. She gets a lot of old news stories about a 'sweet little boy' from Idaho finding the fourth golden ticket in Wonka's contest. They don't sound like Mike at all. She does find an active YouTube channel with Let's Plays that she thinks might be him and has been updated as recently as two weeks ago. It has enough followers to be monetized, but she can't make it through more than a few seconds of video before exiting. It's just video of a video game. She comes across a photograph of all five of them, their parents, and Wonka himself in front of his factory. She spends a few minutes staring at his twelve year old face (definitely exactly the same), and then her own, before giving up. The next morning, when she wakes up, Veruca Salt has added her back. 

She has a photo shoot while she's in town, but it's nothing too fancy. She and her father are back at the hotel in the early afternoon. Their flight home isn't until the next morning. Violet pulls out her laptop and arranges it on the room's desk. She should vlog something, she figures. The light is good, and her make-up has been so carefully and professionally applied. She goes to open her webcam, when she notices the LED activity light is already on. Which is weird. She's pretty sure she turned it off the last time she used it. But she has been busy. She supposes it could have slipped her mind. She turns it off.

It turns itself back on again.

She rolls her eyes in frustration. Great. The thing is busted. She tries to turn it off again. A video screen pops up instead and maximizes itself. She cannot find her cursor and cannot get it to close. She is stuck staring at a video of her own confused and frustrated face.

"What the-..."

Her phone blows up.

_y r u googling me_  
_y r u googling me_  
_y r u googling me_

It comes in at least twenty times, from different numbers, with area codes she doesn't recognize, and they come faster than anyone could be typing. He must be using some sort of script.

Because it's obvious who it is, even behind burner accounts. She turns back to her laptop and fixes her own moving image with a glare.

"Teavee. You get outta my stuff right now!"

Her phone buzzes with another text message notification.

_why are you googling me Beauregarde_

Why? Why shouldn't she? Why would he care? ...And how did he know? She snatches up her phone; slams her thumbs down in rapid succession. 

_Teavee get out of my laptop NOW!!!_

Her phone buzzes. His thumbs are fast too.

_or what_

He's right, of course, it's an empty threat. She has no idea how to...un-hack a laptop. She growls; turns back towards her hijacked webcam.

"Then turn on your cam and Skype me like a man."

There's a distinct pause on his end, and she takes satisfaction in having thrown him somewhat.

_no_

Before she can reply, her entire laptop shuts off. She gasps at her murky reflection in the black, silent screen. Capslock: on.

_DID YOU JUST KILL MY COMPUTER?????????????????_

She can practically hear the smirk in his text.

_answer my ? & get n answer_

She wants to thrown her phone across the room, except he's not actually in it, so that would be pointless.

_I DON'T KNOW!!!!!!!!!!!_

She can't seem to stop using excessive punctuation, but maybe that makes them even since he doesn't seem to use any.

_why did u dox me at the airport_

"What?" She says, out loud, to the empty room.

 _I didn't dox you_ , she types back, after her momentary confusion has lifted. _You can't dox someone irl. And I didn't. I recognized you. Like people do._

There's another pause before he replies:

_thats it_

"Yes, duh," she finds herself saying, again, to the empty room, before typing the same, adding:

_and it made me think about you know, all that. I looked up everybody not just you._

Unintentionally in ticket winning order. His next reply makes her chest tighten.

_i know_

Because oh crap oh crap oh crap there's nothing...embarrassing in her search history, is there? At least she knows there are no indecent pictures of her or anything like that. She knows better. And also has no one to send them to. She hasn't really had time for boys. Not real ones. That doesn't mean there aren't Facebook messages between her and her divas back home gushing over teen idols, YouTube stars, and the occasional boy at the school she goes to (when she isn't beholden to her travel schedule. L.A. schools understand working children, so her absences aren't frowned on). It could be embarrassing if those were published somewhere, but not career ending.

_So did you trash my comp or not?_

Her computer boots back up. She eyes it anxiously. Everything seems fine. ...Except that he has changed the wallpaper to that picture of the five of them, and Wonka. She glares at it, before noticing her webcam is still on.

"Very funny," she tells the little light, sarcastically. 

_u don't like_

"Mike Teavee stop filming me like a lil' freak."

Her phone does not buzz with a reply. The light blinks off. She waits a minute. Five minutes. Ten. Nothing happens. She's alone again in the hotel room. She always was. She and her father fly back to L.A. the next day. Her webcam doesn't turn itself back on again, but weirdly, her computer seems to run a little faster.

It's about a week later, when she's texting with Krystal about the end of school dance (it's only eight months away. They must begin planning) that she scrolls back to look for something in an old thread and hits The Numbers. Mike's numbers. She hasn't deleted them. Her thumb hovers over the edit button. Krystal's messages keep popping up, and she takes so long to answer that the other girl actually calls her.

"Okay, what is going on with you?" Krystal asks, as soon as she picks up. "You've been totally weird since you got back."

"What? Girl, I have not," Violet insists. She so hasn't.

"Don't 'girl' me. You have too! Like, out of it," Krystal argues back. And then thirstily continues: "Did something happen while you were away? You didn't get fired from any of your contracts, did you? You could tell me."

"No," Violet says, rolling her eyes. As if she would even. "Nothing happened."

Because nothing did happened. Except...oh.

"...I just ran into this guy."

And he cyber attacked me but also maybe upgraded my computer? And yeah, that was kind of weird, but-...

"Is he cute?" Krystal chirps.

"Ew, no," Violet says, without thinking. Mike Teavee is so not cute. He's tiny, and pasty, and possibly a Republican. And his hair is ridiculous. And he's a gamer.

"No," Violet says again. "It was one of the guys from the Wonka thing."

"Oh," is Krystal's hushed response. "Girl say no more. I get it."

Krystal has heard...most of the story. The parts people would believe if they hadn't been there. Krystal understands not to push about that.

"But anyway," Violet says, quickly changing the subject, "I am thinking something backless..."

"Your daddy would never," Krystal squeals.

That discussion goes on for a while. When she ends the call, she's back on her text message history again, the Mike numbers taunting her.

There is no way any of them are his actual number.

She stretches out on her bed, on her stomach, and pops a piece of gum in her mouth. She goes through each number, methodically texting the same thing: _hey_. Each time she gets a delivery failure message almost immediately. She frowns, even as her jaws continue to work on her gum. Well now what?

Forget him, of course. That's the obvious answer. She could just never speak to him again; speak of him; think of him. It would be easy.

But then she would be giving up. That would be him, beating her. The Queen does not lose. ...Well, The Queen does not quit, at least. Instead, she thinks for a moment, then types: _Mike Teavee hit me up_ into her phone's browser. The results are ever weirder than just googling his name on its own: mostly news articles, older than the Wonka ones, all in German, featuring pictures of army vehicles. She has no idea what that's about. She doesn't speak German. But it's not the search results she's interested in. She makes herself do something else, because sitting there, staring at her phone is letting him win too. Instagram works. She's sufficiently distracted by hearting things that by the time she goes to sleep, she has forgotten about her earlier search.

His text message jars her awake at 2am. She blinks at the single word from the unfamiliar number on her phone.

_what_

She sits up in bed and rubs at her blurry eyes. It's a good question. She types back:

_Is this your number?_

It takes him longer to reply than it had the other day. When he does, it's a single letter:

_y_

_So I don't have to Google you_ , she sends, _every time I want to text you._

Another pause on his end.

_no_

She figured not.

_So what is it?_

His _y_ is faster this time.

_So I can text you._

This reply takes him the longest.

_u r doing it_

He is the worst. She figures he's probably typing this all one handed as he plays some post-apocalyptic monster shooting game with the other. He probably has no idea what time it is, or something like that. 

_It's 2am here. Where are you that it's not? I thought you were from Iowa._

_idaho_

She's not sure there's actually any difference, but whatever.

_So what is it?_

His _y_ is starting to get real frustrating.

_So. I. Can. Text. U. TV._

It's another wait before she gets:

_y. do. u. want. 2_

Why does she want to? 

_Why not?_

He doesn't answer, and she flops back against her pillow in frustration, then shoves her phone under it, so it can't wake her up again. It's the weekend, and she is getting some much deserved beauty sleep.

When she wakes up the next morning, yet another unfamiliar number has texted her three letters.

_M_  
_T_  
_V_

She adds it to her contacts and deletes all the others.


	2. two

So she talks to Mike Teavee now. It's weird. He's weird. The whole thing is weird.

(She interacts with Veruca on Instagram too, but that's mostly through hearts and emojis, which aren't exactly the same thing as a conversation.)

It takes her a week to text his actual number back, because Violet has a life, and in that time he does not text her again. She had not expected him to. When she finally does text him, he doesn't seem to care that it has taken her so long, or if he does he's good at hiding it. She does not remember him being good at hiding anything, so she suspects it's the former. It's also possible time has no meaning for him; days blending into one another as he beats levels/score points/shoots whatevers. That's what gamers are like, isn't it?

The first thing she does is ask him if he did something to her computer (yes: deleted background app crap; repaired her disk permissions. Violet vaguely knows what that first thing is. She has no idea on the second, but she isn't about to let him know that). And then he texts back that if that's all she wants, she should delete his number, because he isn't tech support. But with less punctuation and more chat-speak than that. 

He's going to make this difficult. Now _that_ sounds like Mike. Well she can be just as difficult. He is dealing with a _diva_ after all. She's more than capable of making some runty Indiana (or wherever he's from) redneck bow down. She could chew him up and spit him out before he could even think about hitting Ctrl Alt Delete.

She texts on like he isn't being a total snot. He's pretty cagey at first. When she asks him why he was in Atlanta, he answers that he 'had a thing'. When she asks him what he's been up to, he asks her to clarify if she means 'rn', and when she says 'sure', he says he's 'talking to u'. Oh, ha ha. She tries to get him to say what he's doing generally, and basically gets back that he does a lot of stuff, and it's more or less the same, and he means: nothing. He's doing nothing. He does make it a point to say that he certainly isn't flying around, renting out his face as a coloring book.

_Nobody would buy your face, TV._

She hits send before worrying if that was too mean. She doesn't have to worry long. 

_def not. couldn't afford me_

When she asks him why he deleted his twitter, he answers that it 'got hacked'. That's pure bull, and she comes close to telling him off for trying that on her. Something happened to him at Wonka's; something that has frozen him in time, somehow. It hasn't driven him away from technology entirely, clearly, but he has gone on the down-low. She's going to find out what it was.

 _Oh yeah. Hackers are the worst._

She makes sure to add the perfect, sarcastic, collection of emojis to this text. He gets it.

_100% & always admitted_

So humble. 

_and I guess as a big bad hacker, you know everything about me already, huh?_

_not everything_

Now that's interesting. So he is actually thinking about her. 

_You wanna know? AMA._

He doesn't ask anything. Or rather, what he texts is not a question.

_u exploded_

Oh. Well. There that is.

She doesn't really want to talk about it. She never has. Plus:

_And? You know I did. You saw. You were there._

He's going to ask now. The question. The one she doesn't know the answer to. 

_but you're ok_

...That was not the question. Was it? It sounds more like...concern for her well-being. Which can't be right.

_I'm okay. You saw that too._

_wonka?_

That's not the question either: that's an answer. The only answer she has.

_Yeah, Wonka. Or his little workers or whatev. They fixed me, I guess. Don't ask how. I don't know. My daddy won't say._

_would u want to know_

She gets a feeling that's not really a question either. And he's right, too: she doesn't. What would it make her, if she knew? She just wants to be a normal teenage girl (albeit, a famous one). As far as she knows, that's what she is. That's what she intends to stay.

_No. Knowing Wonka, it was crazy._

_where is the lie_

Something occurs to her suddenly.

_Speaking of where stuff is: u videoed that._

And no video has ever surfaced. If this has all been some elaborate blackmail set up-...

_long gone_

She's not sure she believes that.

_You deleted?_

_no_

No, of course he didn't. But he also continues:

_no WiFi, couldn't upload it. and then wonka stomped my phone_

Her response is basically visceral. 

_O M G, he stomped your phone???_

It's silly, she knows, but it's like she can feel a difference in his responses. Like a switch has been flipped on inside him. And all because she empathizes with the fact that a cellphone was destroyed three years ago. Well. Like, obviously. You don't smash somebody's cell.

_hardcore. multiple times. total wreck. lost everything. even before all the other stuff that happened happened_

She shakes her head, which he can't see.

_smdh. And adults say WE have no respect._

_lol_

She gets the feeling he actually is. Or at least smiling. She's not sure if she's ever actually seen him smile. It's hard to picture.

Anyway: they text daily for a while. She wouldn't have thought they had enough in common to have one conversation, let alone an imessage thread that goes so far back it has to load more messages if she scrolls up enough. But Mike knows all the newest, best apps, and juicy online gossip, and cool podcasts, and creepypasta, and YouTube videos. And when he links, he always has something to say. He never tries to talk to her about gaming.

He keeps weird hours (he mentioned once that he didn't have school the next day, even though it's not a holiday). She manages to train him, little by little, to send the bulk of his responses at a reasonable time, in the evening, when she can hit him back right away. 

She does not tell Krystal about him. She does not tell anyone about him. 

He's pretty easy to figure out: he likes to needle people; to get a rise out of them. At first she thinks he can dish it out, but can't take it, but she's wrong. He likes when she pushes back.

Having figured out his buttons, it only takes three weeks to goad him into FaceTime-ing with her. She's tried to get him to before, and he's always rejected the request, and no amount of sweetness has persuaded him. So instead she tells him his choice is perfectly reasonable considering how dumb his face looks. She immediately gets the FaceTime request (which she accepts), and there it is: his dumb face telling her:

"Uh, your face is dumb."

She's surprised again by how young he looks; how high and childish his voice is. In her mind, the voice behind his texts had been deeper: a teenage boy's voice. It's hard to reconcile with this one.

Also his bangs do not fit in frame. They soar up and out like a rocket made of hair, and she honestly can't tell if this is some sort of stylistic choice he has made, or if his hair just grows like that. The rest of it is crammed under a snapback. She scoffs at him.

"Puh-lease," she purrs, running a finger over one of her eyebrows. "This face is flawless and you know it."

He rolls his eyes, but she can't help but notice he doesn't argue. 

"So you got me," he declares, instead. "I'm on FaceTime. Happy?"

"Yup," she replies smugly, cracking her gum. He makes a face.

"I can't believe you can still chew gum," he says, shaking his head. 

She shrugs. Going cold turkey was never an option. She can't remember a time before chewing. Besides:

"This ain't Wonka: it's Bubblicious. The only berry in here is straw. And anyway: whatever happened to you sure didn't keep you from ever touching a computer again."

His eyes narrow.

"Who said anything happened to me?"

Obviously something happened to him. He isn't even five feet tall (not counting his hair). She fixes him with a withering look.

"I don't see you owning any chocolate factory," she points out.

"Yeah, and I don't and didn't want to!" He insists. "Like, he seriously couldn't have just asked? 'Hey, you wanna own an entire factory that relates to zero of your interests and be responsible for the success or failure of a global corporation at age twelve?' Um, how about: no? And I woulda peaced outta there. Why are you laughing?"

She is laughing. The phone shakes in her hand. She props it against her laptop screen and catches her breath.

"Sorry," she giggles. "Sorry, just: imagining you saying that to him."

"I would've," he says, just as insistently. She eyes him a moment.

"Yeah, you probably would."

He's frowning lightly and looking down at something, but she can't see what. Some other technological device on his lap? A food stain on his shirt? The place on his rib cage where he plans to get a tattoo?

"I seriously thought we were just gonna look at candy," he mutters.

She finds herself nodding.

"Yeah," she agrees. "And instead we got spanked."

He looks up at her, and his face contorts, but she can't get a read on what he's feeling. It's too many different expressions too fast.

"Spanked," he says, flatly.

"Mmmhmm. And good," she reiterates. He's looking away again.

"Maybe _you_ did."

He's sounding highly sulky, so she decides not to press the matter.

"Anyway," she says, "so we talked about that. That is done."

It isn't and they both know it.

"Definitely. Can we go back to texting now, like civilized people?"

"Ohhhhhhh no. No no no no no. I am FaceTime-ing you now, and if you reject it, you'll regret it."

This is Violet's business face. Her confidence _is_ quite intense. As predicted, he folds under it.

"If you have to, then at least Skype me," he grouses, then hangs up.

She smirks to herself. She does not text him to remind him that she does not know his Skype username; she knows there will be a request waiting from him the next time she signs on.

"Captain Knuckleduster?" She says pointedly, one perfect eyebrow raised in incredulity the next time she signs on, accepts his request, and Skypes him. She had thought his username would be some kind of play on 'Teavee'. His since deleted twitter had been.

"Uh, it's a video game?" He tells her, as if everyone else in the world has heard of this Captain Whoever-thing. "It's _nostalgic_."

Her own username, predictably, is Queen Of Pop. She wonders if this game of his is nostalgic like something he played when he was ten, or nostalgic like his mother is nostalgic. She doesn't ask, because she suspects he wouldn't appreciate the comparison.

Something she had sort of noticed when they FaceTime-ed, but particularly notices now on a larger screen is that he seems to exist in some sort of shapeless void? Or at least: in a small and very dark room. She can just barely tell he is sitting in a chair. If she squints, his black t-shirt and hair blend into the nothingness behind him and he looks like a floating skull.

"So question," she says, rather than asks, "does your mamma lock you in a closet, or the basement?"

It's always rewarding to watch his face wrinkle in confusion.

"Huh?" He asks. "I'm not in either of-...what?"

"Oh, so your living room is a cave?" She sasses on.

"This isn't the living room," he snorts. "No one in their right mind would willingly spend time in our living room. Hold for receipts." 

He exits the frame with inhuman speed and grace, and it's only after he scoots himself back that she realizes he's sitting in one of those rolling office chairs. By then she's too busy staring at the pictures he has texted.

"...so many pineapples," she finally manages to say.

"Mmmhmm," he hums, clearly enjoying her shock.

"Do you even got pineapples in Nebraska?"

She definitely knows he's not actually from Nebraska. Or she's almost sure. But his reaction is too priceless. His eyes roll back and his hands twist into claws on either side of his face. Then he lets his head hit the desk in front of him (at least, she assumes it's a desk; she can't see it) with a dull thud.

"I. Duh. Hoe," he mutters, head still on his desk.

"You are? Mikey Teavee," she gasps, theatrically, "and here I thought you were a good boy."

His head shoots up.

" _No_ ," he growls through clenched teeth. "No 'Mikey'."

"Mi _chael_ ," she tries instead. He does not seem to have any objections. "Idaho. Whatever. I dunno if you got pineapples, or Starbucks, or anything on whatever lil' farm you live on over th-..."

"I don't live on a farm!"

His voice is so high and incredulous and shriek-y, and she was already sort of snickering but now she's full out laughing, one hand over her mouth to contain it because Mike Teavee is not a boy who likes being laughed at, even if she isn't laughing at him exactly.

"Are you trolling me, or do you seriously think I live on a farm?"

She shrugs from behind her hand.

"I _don't_. I'm not sticking my phone out a window to prove it. I don't want my mom getting any ideas."

She manages to get hold of herself.

"Ideas about what?"

She's still grinning a little.

"Me," he tells her, "taking an interest in the outside. Or...other people."

"Oh, the horror," she says sarcastically.

He folds his skinny arms across his skinny chest.

"You've met my mom," he accuses.

"And she seemed fine," she insists. She had, actually. A little eccentric, sure, but Violet would say the same thing about Mike. It definitely runs in that family. "Now, if you wanna talk over-protective, exhibit A: my daddy."

"She treats me like a little kid," he continues flatly.

 _You look like one_ , her brain supplies, but she manages not to let her mouth say it. It's weird, how suddenly it's all she can see again. She had almost gotten used to it; almost forgotten. His eyes narrow at her silence, so she blurts:

"Same thing. 'Cause he's my manager, my daddy basically gets to decide everything I do, and go everywhere I go."

She actually...hadn't realized how much it bothered her before. Like...it didn't. It's normal for young L.A. stars: plenty of her YouTube and Disney Channel friends are in the same boat. And she can go to the movies with her girls if she wants (but they all get invited to premiers, so they go to those, or somebody's parents get the screeners so they watch in the comfort of home theaters), or sleep over one of their houses, but go to a mixed gender party? Oh no. Eugene would have to know everybody who was going to be there, and the parents who would absolutely have to be home. And if a boy asked her on date? Lord help that boy.

"What about your moms?" Mike asks.

She shoos the question away with one hand.

"Divorced. She lives up in Nappa and paints pottery."

Violet wrinkles her nose, because: _pottery_.

"But it's fine, they still good, we get together for holidays and stuff when we can. Probably gonna spend Christmas up there. What about your dad?"

He jerks his head upwards in a nod.

"Same."

"You're gonna spend Christmas with him in Nappa?" She asks, raising an eyebrow.

"No, he bailed when I was like six. I dunno where he is, and I don't care. Annnnnnnnnd we're probably gonna spend Christmas being Jewish, like usual, but I can check with my mom just in case there's an update on that."

He smirks, leans forward, and disconnects.

He always does that: never says good-bye, or goodnight, or ttyl. He just leaves.

But she gets used to it, like she's gotten used to his tiny childish face. His lips loosen the longer they talk, and he supplies little, surprising facts about himself. For instance: he really doesn't go to school. He was "asked not to come back" before the whole Wonka thing.

("They kicked you out of school," she'd asked, incredulously.

"And shul," he'd bragged.)

But he has a GED. His mother is a teacher. No, he cannot explain why she dresses like that (she always has). He has no pets (never did). He has ADHD. He remote hacked a German army tank. Because he could. He hacked the Wonka contest because he could. Idaho is boring. There is a potato museum.

He never brings up whatever is going on with his whole 'Tuck Everlasting' situation. She slides into Veruca Salt's DM's one night out of desperation.

 _Hey. So weird question, I know,_ she writes, _but like do u know what happened to Teavee?_

She has to wait for the next day for an answer, because: Russia. Veruca's response is:

_I assume your American police have jailed him by now. That boy trouble._

(Violet thinks Mike likes to look and talk like a lot more trouble than he is. And then she remembers how he hacked her. And apparently Germany.)

But it turns out the Russian girl doesn't know what happened to him at the factory either. She does, of course, want to know why Violet is asking, and Violet tells her she doesn't really know, she just wants to make sure they're all okay, suddenly. And then Veruca sends her about a million DMs about how okay she is, and how her operations have all gone so well, and she could dance if she wanted but she has so many other interests and ballet is just childish really. By the time she has finished, Violet is pretty sure Veruca is not okay at all, but she has no idea what to do or even say about it.

Mike does not seem surprised when she brings up these concerns during one of their Skype sessions.

"Yeah," he says. "Obviously none of us are okay."

"Excuse you," she scoffs back. "I am just fine."

Is she? Yes. Totally. Completely fine. It was just a thing. She doesn't need to talk about it. She doesn't want to talk about it.

"Maybe you and Gloop are okay," he allows. "You guys went out early. It got worse."

But he doesn't say how it got worse, or why Veruca needed operations, _or why he is so gosh darned small_.

"You think that Bucket kid is okay?" She asks. 

Mike shrugs.

"Oh, he's fine."

Like he knows. Well, he hacked Wonka once, he probably still does. Because he can. He'd know if Charlie Bucket was, like, dead, or something. He'd leak that to the media in a second.

"But I mean: he has to live there," she says. "With that old wackadoo."

She shudders. Mike smirks.

"We could throw it out there to the internet," he suggests. "Get it trending. Like, hashtag: pray for Charlie Bucket. Hashtag: we're not sure he's okay."

He makes hashtag signs with his fingers, and the idea of trolling Wonka like that is so hysterical somehow, that she's laughing loud and breathless, and on the other side of the screen she can hear him laughing with her.


	3. three

They're getting smoothies at the Grove one Saturday, when suddenly Krystal turns on her.

"Ooooooookay. Violet Beauregarde. Who. You. Been. Talkin' to?"

The other divas bob their heads in back-up. They have talked about this. They have been talking about _her_.

"What? Nobody," Violet insists. Not a drop of gossip about any of them has left her lips. She's a little wounded that they would think that about her, honestly.

"Nuh-uh," Krystal continues. "There is no texting you after dark anymore. You are clearly otherwise occupied."

"Like not even on facebook messenger," Madison agrees, with the sort of hushed soberness such a statement deserves.

Ohhhhhhhhh noooooooooo. They mean...

"I have just been busy with the brand," Violet lies. They don't buy it. 

"Is he famous?" Krystal asks.

"Is he _married_?" Jasmine asks.

"He's not anything!" Violet whines. "There is no him!"

Her squad's expressions all remain dubious at best.

"For real," she tries, more earnestly. "If there was somebody, how would my girls not be the first to know? And judge."

That seems to placate them, and they return to their smoothies and recent audition stories and discussions about the true meaning of crop tops and Violet is safe. For now.

They wouldn't understand Mike Teavee. 

_Violet_ , they would say. _He's a geek._

(Mike is not a geek, Mike is a genius. The things he just knows and can just do are, frankly, ridiculous.)

_Violet, he's terrible._

(Mike isn't terrible. He definitely has some...issues. But who doesn't? She's also pretty sure he leads with those issues on purpose. Like a test. Or a wall.)

_Violet you are internet dating a baby._

...Okay, that would be the hardest to explain, and it still shocks her suddenly sometimes, when she can see him holding normal sized objects in his tiny hands, or when he makes a particularly childish face. But Mike is sixteen. She's almost sure. You have to be, she thinks, to take a GED. He is maybe recently sixteen, but still: not the child he appears to be. He does not speak or think like a child. She's not sure he did even when he was twelve.

Also they are not dating. That's just silly. They're...talking. They're friends. He lives in Idaho and she has met him twice in person. That's it. 

It's January and she is back from Christmas with her mother (Mike has reported that Ethel had been unreasonably unwilling to upgrade from Judaism to Satanism), when she gets the email from Pop Color. It's an in store appearance travel request; just a quick weekend trip. Her daddy has already signed off on it. She stares at it for a very, very long time. 

"What," Mike says, when she logs on on that evening. His chair is turned to the side, and he's tipped back in it, feet up and resting on something out of frame, head craned towards his computer at an angle that does not look at all comfortable.

She's tries not to look...anything. It's just a question.

"Hey, so, do you live in Boise?" She asks, nonchalantly. Well. Tries to. It comes out a little intense. 

He sits up; swivels his chair back to center.

"No..." he answers, slowly, as if he can't imagine why she would be asking. As if there are other cities in Idaho. ...There are other cities in Idaho, aren't there. It's an entire state.

"Oh. It's just: I have to go to Boise for this brand thing in like a week, and I just thought..." 

She tries not to sound disappointed. She does not succeed.

"But whatever," she continues. "No big deal." 

Because she doesn't know what she thought. That he would come to some make-up store and watch her pose for pictures? No, he is a boy, he would rather die.

"Meridian," he says.

She has no idea what that means. Her face says as much.

"I live in Meridian," he repeats, a little more slowly than necessary. "It's like twenty minutes away. From Boise. Half hour, maybe, on the 84."

That's close. That's really, really close. Mike looks...uncomfortable.

"There's a bus, but the bus sucks, and Boise also sucks, by the way..."

He doesn't want to see her.

He sees her almost every night on a computer screen, but he doesn't want to see her in person. That's so very Mike Teavee. She should have expected it. It shouldn't hurt like it hurts.

He's still talking.

"But I could. Do that. I guess."

Like he could. Yank teeth out of his own head. Theoretically.

"You don't have to do anything you don't want," she says, frostily, and feels rewarded when he looks as hurt as she feels. "I'll probably be too busy anyway. I just thought it'd be rude if I didn't say I was gonna be there, that's all. Don't read into it."

His face contorts with anger like it had that day at the airport. An angry Mike Teavee is a little frightening: he looks unpredictable; like he could do anything. 

He doesn't do anything. He spits:

"Yeah well you can shove it. I don't need your pity."

She has no idea where that came from.

"You think I talk to you outta pity? I don't talk to you 'cause I pity you, Michael, I talk to you 'cause I like talking to you," she tells him, ruining the sentiment somewhat by saying it like he's a complete idiot for thinking otherwise, which he is. "I talk to you 'cause _I like you_."

The anger drains out of his face, but he still doesn't look happy. This is not how this was supposed to go. He was supposed to say he lived in Boise, and then she was going to suggest they hang out. And then they would hang out. It's so simple, and yet: it has somehow gone completely off the rails.

"Do you talk to me because you pity me?" She asks. "Because I got some words if you do."

"No," he says sullenly. "I talk to you because you talk to me like I'm just a guy."

"You _are_ a guy, Teavee," she tells him, without really thinking about it. Because he is.

The look of shade he throws her is, like, legendary.

Because he isn't. Not _just_ a guy, like any other guy. Like a normal guy her age that she could hang out with without people thinking she was his babysitter. 

"I dunno if you _noticed_..."

His every word is drenched in sarcasm so thick you couldn't suck it through a straw.

"...but I happen to look like I'm twelve. And I dunno if you know this, _but I'm not twelve_."

It hits her then, that his hesitance is not because he doesn't want to see her: it's because he doesn't want to be _seen_. 

He looks angry again, but it's not directed at her anymore. And she does get it: it really does have to suck for him. Fifteen and twelve are only three years apart, but twelve-year-old Violet seems like a completely different world to her now. If everyone still treated her like she was that girl, regardless of what she really was...yeah, she would have an epic breakdown and she knows it. The thought of her little-kid face staring back at her in the mirror every day without change; of baby fat refusing to melt away (although Mike doesn't really have any of that); of that face adults make and that voice they use to talk to children that children hate even when they are actual children...

"I know you're not twelve," she tells him softly. 

He nods, and his face has gone back to something like Mike-Teavee-neutral, which always looks a little bored, and a little sulky, and sometimes a little haughty, but not at the moment. She's afraid he might be about to log off, so she changes subjects. And tactics.

"So you don't even actually like me," she accuses. 

It works. He makes a face like _she's_ the exasperating one (he, like, seriously has not even seen her at her exasperating-est).

"I just literally said I like you."

"Nuh-uh," she points out. "You said you like how I talk to you."

"It's the same thing," he insists, and he's back to his eye-rolling, mouthy self, all moping at least momentarily forgotten.

"Is not," she says, even though she does actually think he meant it to be.

" _Fiiiiiiiiiiiiiine_ ," he says, dragging the word out in the grand tradition of teenage boys asked to do anything anywhere. "Violet Beauregarde-..."

"Violet Beauregarde, H.R.H., ruler of Pop-dom," she prompts, majestically, but not seriously.

"And I'm disconnecting."

One of his fingers moves theatrically and pointedly towards his keyboard, until she relents:

"Or just Violet."

He doesn't usually call her by name: he calls her Beauregarde if he calls her anything. She calls him Teavee too, of course, but she says his first name often enough. Or Michael: he doesn't seem to mind being called Michael. 'Michael' sounds older than 'Mike'. 

"Violet," he says, like she might be a little slow. "I like you."

But it's sincere, and she can see an awkwardness start to creep into his expression so she quickly announces:

"Good. I don't want you to come to Boise anymore."

His mouth flies open.

"But I just said-!"

"I'ma come visit you," she tells him, with a finality that (she believes) cannot be argued with.

He blinks for a moment. And then he looks genuinely pleased. And then he tries to cover it with a nonchalant shrug.

"I mean, it's your funeral," he says.

"Just text me your addy before next Thursday," she reminds him, before logging off for the night.

There is, of course, no way her daddy will be okay with any of this.

 _Daddy_ , she can picture herself saying, _while we're in Idaho I'm gonna go to some random boy's house that I've secretly been talking to online like every night for months, 'kay?_

'No' would be the absolute least of what Eugene would say. And with the added bonus of:

_Also he's not totally random, he's from the Wonka factory thing. Yeah, Mike Teavee. Yeah: the worst one._

She's pretty sure she'd never be allowed out of daddy's sight ever again.

That doesn't mean she isn't going to do it, it just means she's going to have to be sneaky.

(She learns later that Mike did not exactly ask permission either, so much as show up in the doorway of the living room [a shock in and of itself] and announce:

"Violet Beauregarde is coming over next Saturday. You don't have to do anything."

And then try to return to his room as his mother fumbled with, then dropped the gin and tonic in her hand, had a moment of indecision over whether to clean it up, or immediately pursue her son, and then chose to pursue her son.

And Ethel had remembered who she was, and Mike had played the I-thought-you-wanted-me-to-make-friends-mom card, and Ethel had been unable to argue, because what parent doesn't want that for their child? And it is not something Ethel's child has ever done easily. Or at all.

But she had still been a nervous wreck about it, more than any parent should really be about their child having someone over, and still is a week later when Violet shows up at the door, but by the end of the day, Violet understands _why_.) 

It's a week later and they're a half-hour from touching down at BOI, when her stomach clenches, and Violet suddenly can't stop thinking: what if she and her father are the only black people in Idaho? As much as Mike has told her he doesn't live on a farm, she can't picture Idaho as anything but huge flat stretches of potato fields with sad little farm houses and maybe one K-Mart.

But they land, and Boise airport is like any other airport: basically a big mall where planes also are. And she watches out the window of the cab to their hotel, and yeah: it's no L.A., or New York, but it's a city, with pretty tall buildings, and a mall, and multiple Targets, and at least one sushi restaurant, and she's calm by the time they have checked in and willing to believe that Idaho is an actual place where actual people actually live after all.

She knows they have Uber here. She'd checked after Mike texted his address. That's an important part of her plan.

They've talked all week, but both studiously avoided talking about meeting up. What's there to talk about, really? It's just a thing that's going to happen. No weirdness. No pressure.

She hasn't told him that her daddy doesn't exactly...know. At all. He'd probably be proud of her; probably lies to Ethel all the time, but she isn't like that. Eugene has always been her biggest supporter; motivator; defender. She has never felt she had to keep anything from him.

So why is what she is about to do weirdly thrilling?

This is what she does:

The event is mostly in the morning: over by 2pm. She signs. She smiles. She wears lipstick. She goes back to the hotel with her father. She tells him that she has been invited to a thing by the client: spa stuff, and samples, and sorry, girls only, and she'll be back after dinner. No, not too late.

It's so easy. Eugene is disappointed, but unsuspecting. He goes to check out the hotel pool. She orders an Uber to Mike Teavee's house.

Meridian is not the country either, but it is the suburbs. The houses are nice, though. New. Almost identical. A lot of carefully mowed lawns and American flags. That's what the Teavee house looks like too: a ranch-style house identical to its neighbors on either side. She has to check the address carefully, to make sure she has the right one.

Ethel answers the door looking like she has dressed for the occasion, and also like she wants to crawl into a bottle of something and never come out.

"Violet," she says, with false enthusiasm and rapidly fraying edges. "Isn't this nice? Won't you come in? Is your father-..."

"Oh, he couldn't come," Violet lies. "Work stuff."

Her Uber has already pulled away, and she's inside now, and she can see Mike standing a little behind his mother, like if he gets too close to the door, sunlight might hit him and he'll burst into flames. He has not dressed for the occasion: in black cargo pants and a blue t-shirt he looks a little like a bruise, and she's glad she hasn't worn a dress (not that she ever wears anything less than stylish, but she doesn't want him to think she's trying too hard, they are just friends, and Idaho is _cold_ ). 

Mike also looks relieved to hear that her daddy is not in tow.

"Cool," he says, motioning for her to follow him, as his mother continues to fret in front of the door.

"I'll just be...if you kids need..."

Mike does not answer his mother until he has reached the end of the hallway.

"Okay," he calls over his shoulder, like it is the millionth time he has said this to his mother today, and from the way Ethel is acting, Violet thinks it just might be. Mike makes a right, and she follows him, and he shuts the door behind them.

The door closes...oddly. Like a regular door at first, and then slowly and with a sort of decompressing noise. It has, Violet realizes, an anti-slamming device on it.

She is, Violet realizes, in his bedroom.

It takes a moment, because there is a stereotypical way a teen boy's bedroom looks, and Mike Teavee's bedroom does not look like that. Mike Teavee's bedroom looks like an Apple store, if someone painted everything in it black. There are no piles of dirty clothes on the floor. There are no edgy posters on the walls. There is a bed in one corner (no headboard, black comforter pulled up over everything), a closet door (behind which his clothes presumably are), a small couch (also black, the kind of modern minimalist style that is just a metal frame and a couch-shaped pillow), and an enormous desk/storage unit that takes up an entire wall. It's a tech-head's dream set-up: multiple monitors, multiple keyboards, multiple gaming consoles, controllers, headphones, things she doesn't even recognize but is sure are very impressive. And video games. So many video games. Maybe every video game that has ever been made. And every single thing has a place: a perfectly sized and shaped shelf or compartment into which it has been put.

Ethel did not do this. She had glimpsed the rest of the house as she followed Mike here, and it's all bright, mid-century modern, clean, but cluttered. Mike's room is OCD on a manic episode. She walks in a small circle to take it all in. He sits in his desk chair. The toes of his sneakers just touch the floor.

"Your mom," she says, once she has found her voice, "is okay with the door being closed?"

Eugene would not have been. Eugene would not be okay with any of this. 

"Yeah, why wouldn't she-..." It hits him mid-sentence why she might not be, and he stumbles his way though the rest. "She...knows. Yeah. It's. Yeah. Don't worry about it."

He doesn't look worried, but he looks a little distant. She takes a seat on the couch, which seems to put him at ease somewhat. He draws up his feet: sits cross-legged in his chair.

"Soooooo," he drawls. "Chez: me."

He uses one hand to push off the edge of his desk, and his chair twists slowly from side to side.

"It's very...black," she says. 

He shrugs.

"I like it."

She sort of likes it too. It's very him, and if it's a little weird, it's way preferable to dirty laundry and ugly band posters.

"I wasn't expecting to hang in your actual room," she admits.

"Where else would we hang out?"

It's a good question. She has, after all, seen the living room.

"It's just, like, normally you don't go in a boy's bedroom."

She has never been in a boy's bedroom.

He pushes off the desk harder. The chair spins in a full circle. Once. Twice.

"Uh, _you_ can go sit in the hallway if you want," he tells her, "but I'm gonna stay here."

Three spins. Four.

"I'm not sitting in your hallway, Teavee. Can you stop that?"

He catches the edge of the desk with his hand and stops spinning abruptly; does not look like he realizes he was even doing it.

"Oh. Sorry."

She wonders if Ethel would weep openly if she knew her son had apologized for something of his own free will.

"Look," Mike says, slumping down in his chair until almost all of his feet rest on the floor. "I dunno normal, and I don't really care. I usually don't let anyone in my room."

The place does seem like an Ethel-free zone. Violet smirks at him.

"I get what you're saying, and I feel appropriately privileged. Like some kinda ticket winner. Of possibly a golden variety."

He barks out a laugh, and this is getting less uncomfortable by the second.

"Is that your way of requesting my grand tour?" He asks, sitting back up in his chair and kicking off from the desk so that it rolls closer to her.

"Maybe. I'm kinda understandably wary of those," she points out. "Do I gotta sign something?"

"Nope," he says. "It's also a pretty short tour, and there are no snacks."

He kicks off from the arm of the couch and spins around again, arms stretched wide.

"Be-hold!" He sing-songs, as the chair spins to a stop. "All of my crap. It's pretty cool, I made a bunch of it myself, and you can touch anything you want without fear of ironic punishment."

She stands and moves around the room slowly, leaning in to get a closer look at certain things, although there really isn't a lot. She glances over her shoulder at him; pokes one of his headsets out of place with a finger, just to see what he will do. He shrugs at her.

"What'd you make?" She asks, because nothing looks hot glue-gunned, or stapled together, and there's no art.

He hops out of his chair and saunters over to her.

"I build all my own systems," he tells her, gesturing to the computers, and speaking with the sort of nonchalance someone might use to say _I had toast for breakfast_. "And the desk and the shelves. I did a thing in the closet too, but it's a closet, it's boring."

She takes a step back from the wall unit, which she had assumed was from Ikea.

"You built that?"

She's looking at the very solid shelves and his very scrawny arms and thinking he still must mean 'assembled'.

" _Yes_ ," he says, sensing her doubt. "I mean, I didn't chop down the trees, but I ordered a bunch wood, and did some measurements, and got to use power tools and hit stuff with a hammer for while, which, if you've never done it, I highly recommend." 

She approaches the shelves again; runs a finger along them. Tries to find the mistakes that a teenage boy should have made. Everything is smooth and square and perfect.

"And I did that when I was a kid," he continues. "It's kind of lame now. I'll probably rip it out."

He's pointing up. She follows his finger. His ceiling is painted as black as his walls, and she's not sure what he means at first, until she sees the gleam of tiny LEDs. 

"You can't really see it with the lights on," he seems to realize. He walks over to a switch by the door and plunges the room into total darkness.

Except the ceiling gleams with tiny pricks of light and she realizes they are arranged meticulously into the constellations of the night sky, like the ceiling of New York City's Grand Central Terminal, or those little glow in the dark star-shaped stickers a lot of kids have. Mike's stars are shaped like actual stars, they dim and brighten and twinkle electronically, like the real stars do, up somewhere above L.A.'s fog and light pollution. 

It's dizzying to stand and stare straight up, so she sits on the floor first, then lays down on her back. The stars cast enough dim light for her to see him watching her out of the corner of her eye. She pats the floor next to her. He hesitates, then creeps over and stretches out beside her.

"I didn't know you liked this stuff," she says. It really is like being outside on a completely clear night. If the outside had wall to wall carpeting.

"I don't," he tells her. "I like wiring stuff. I don't give a crap about Astronomy. Like I said: it's lame."

"It is not lame," she insists. "It's beautiful."

He doesn't say anything. After a moment, he gets up and turns the lights back on, and she's still on her back in the middle of his floor feeling a little foolish.

"I can show you the scorch marks in the laundry room from some of the other stuff I've done, if you want," he says, dryly.

She gets to her feet; places a hand on her hip.

"Uh-huh. I get it," she sasses. "You're just the baddest bad boy who ever did bad."

"Yup."

He's plopped down in his chair again. She flops down on the couch.

"Anything less is purely accidental," he informs her.

"Oh, totally," she mock-agrees.

He grins toothily and a little wickedly, and scoots his chair a little closer to the couch again. He uses his foot to push off of the spot right next to her leg, spinning the chair again, and again. She rolls her eyes. She sticks out her own foot to stop him.

Everything comes crashing down.


	4. four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just want to take a moment to thank people for reading...way more words than I ever thought I'd write about a Broadway musical version of 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory'. And a particular thank you to people who have left comments: they really brightened my day. I hope this is not the chapter that sends you all running and screaming, because things get a little...weird. And I'm thinking there are probably 4 or 5 more chapters of this to go. But again, thanks!

Literally.

Her foot slams into the chair, and his eyes have a moment to widen, before the chair tips out from under him and he topples to the ground with a thud, head first.

And he doesn't move.

And his head is at a strange angle; his neck turned just a little too far.

And she is frozen.

And his eyes are open and he doesn't blink and he doesn't move.

She isn't actually sure how she gets from his room to the hallway, but all she knows is she's walking briskly and stiffly down it suddenly, and it seems to take forever before she gets to the kitchen. Mrs. Teavee is at the table, a glass of something that isn't water in her hand.

Violet expects a scream to come out the moment she opens her mouth, but instead her voice is a shaky whisper she can barely push past her lips.

"Mike fell."

Mrs. Teavee looks up at her, face creasing in concern. She doesn't seem to have heard.

"Violet, honey? Is everything okay?" 

"Mike fell," she repeats, and manages to make it louder this time. Her voice grows in volume as the words tumble out of her. "Mike fell. He just he fell, and I don't know but he fell, and _he fell_..."

Now Mrs. Teavee is the frozen one, eyes wide, drink held in mid-air.

"And he's not moving," Violet babbles.

Ethel's face goes slack. Her drink lowers slowly to the table.

"Oh," Ethel says.

Violet sort of breathes at her anxiously.

"Let's just...give him a minute," Ethel says.

Violet's brain explodes.

"OH. MY. GAWD. LADY DID YOU NOT HEAR ME? YO' SON IS HURT. HE IS HURT MAYBE REAL BAD, AND YOU JUST SITTIN' THERE IN MARGARITA-VILLE. GET. YO'SELF. UP. AN' HELP HIM!"

Mrs. Teavee chuckles nervously.

"I'm sure he's...fine," she says in an overly calm voice, as she makes no attempt to move.

Violet has a terrible thought.

Mike has clearly been a difficult child, and Ethel is clearly a woman at the end of her rope most of the time. Maybe she's past the end. Maybe she's so over-medicated she just doesn't understand what's going on. Or maybe...

"Oh my god do you want your son to be dead so you don't have to deal with him anymore? Is that it?" Violet accuses. 

That gets Ethel to her feet.

"No," she insists, aghast. "No! He's-...oh."

She drops back into her chair again, face in her hands. She sits there for a moment, and then stands again, a sad smile on her face. She smooths her skirt.

"Honey," Ethel says, "come with me."

Mrs. Teavee is guiding her, somehow, back down the hallway, one arm gently around her waist. Violet does not want to go, but her feet have a mind of their own, trudging over the beige carpet.

Mike still has not moved. His eyes still stare blindly and unblinking forward. Mrs. Teavee leaves Violet by the door and goes to her son. She kneels next to him. She pulls his t-shirt up.

Mike does not have a belly button. Mike does have a little door in his stomach, the kind Violet remembers from dolls she used to have that ran on batteries. Ethel presses down on one side of it, and the door springs open.

"It happened again?" She asks Mike's stomach.

"Obviously it happened again!" A tiny, high-pitched voice squeaks.

Violet creeps closer.

A very small Mike Teavee pops his head out of the door in his own stomach.

Violet can hear his little voice squeaking, like a cartoon mouse, something about loose couplings in the neck, and system overloads, and hard reboots, but none of it sinks in. All she can do is stare at the tiny figure. At the actual Mike Teavee.

This is Mike at sixteen. Sixteen years old and eleven inches tall. His shoulders are broader (proportionally) than those of the Mike she has been looking at for months. His dark hair is floppier, and he has something like a V.R. helmet pushed up on top of his tiny head, and a headset and microphone down one cheek. His jaw is a little squarer. He's just as pale, and he's recognizably _Mike_ , but he's Mike as Mike should look.

"...tell Wonka to shrink and send another soldering iron," he's squeaking.

It's the sound of Wonka's name that makes her make a noise. Violet tries to slap a hand over her own mouth, but it's too late. The miniature Mike spins in her direction and sees her. He does not look...pleased. He whirls back on his mother.

"MOM, WHAT THE HELL."

She almost has to cover her ears, the pitch of his shrieking is so high. Ethel is unflappable in the face of her tiny, screaming, swearing offspring.

"Michael, the poor girl thought you were dead," she says.

Mike groans and yanks a strange pair of gloves off his hands. The clothes he is wearing are odd too: both they and the gloves have a series of wires running along them, and Violet gets the feeling they have something to do with controlling...

The life-sized robot version of himself that she has been talking to for months.

"Shrunk," Violet says, without meaning to.

Mike and his mother both look towards her, and their faces wear such identical expressions of _no duh_ , that hysterical laughter bubbles out of her mouth and she doesn't try to stop it.

"You...Wonka," she says between gasps, "and...he...you...shrunked..."

Mike watches her for a moment, looking fairly un-amused, then shrieks:

"HEY. Beauregarde. Snap out of it."

She does. It still feels a little like she might be going crazy, but it's no longer leaking out of her in uncontrollable giggles. She tip toes hesitantly over to...both of him, and then kneels beside his mother. This close up, his teenage-ness is even more apparent. There is a tiny dusting of tiny stubble on his tiny face. 

She reaches a hand out towards him, palm up, so he can climb onto it. He looks down at her fingers.

"Are you freaking kidding me?" He squeaks. Violet lets her hand drop.

"He doesn't really like being picked up," Ethel explains. 

"Yeah, I don't really like falling to my tiny death, so nuts," Mike says, sarcastically. And then he coughs and rubs his throat. He has been yelling at the top of his lungs this whole time, Violet realizes, so that they can understand him.

"Mom? Can you?" He squeaks wearily, and much more quietly.

Ethel turns towards the life-sized copy of the younger version of her son's head and pries its mouth open. She shuts its eyes as an afterthought. Mike readjusts his microphone.

"Thanks," he says, shortly. His Barbie doll-sized lips move, but the voice she can hear is his twelve year old voice. Which is still pretty high, but not painfully so. She can just barely hear a mosquito-like whine underneath it.

Ethel's eyes dart from her actual, miniature son, to Violet, and then back to Mike again.

"...you need a shower," she says.

Mike looks like he wants to die and kill her simultaneously.

"MOM. This is extremely not the time," he exclaims, tiny fists clenched impotently at his sides.

"I know," Ethel tells him, placatingly. "But you know it takes a while to get the bathroom ready, and I'm saying I should go do that."

Mrs. Teavee gets to her feet and makes her way to the door, glancing at them over shoulder several times. Mike is still looking at her like she is incomprehensible and has ruined his life. Ethel gives them one last look, then closes the door behind her.

Ethel Teavee is much cleverer than Violet had previously given her credit for. She wonders when Mike will realize his mother has just made up a reason to leave them alone. To give Mike a chance to explain things without his mother hovering over them. It's very possible he'll never realize it: Mike is very, very smart when it comes to certain things, but understanding his own mother does not seem to be one of them.

Mike has his tiny arms folded across his tiny chest. Violet's knees are beginning to go numb, so she stands, rights his computer chair, and sits on the edge of it, hands on her thighs.

"Okay," she says. "Spill."

He throws his hands up.

"What do you expect me to say? I got shrunk. That's the story. You're looking at it." 

"And when were you gonna tell _me_?" She asks, suspecting the answer even before he replies:

"Uh, never?" He tells her, like it's the most obvious thing in the world.

Her eyes narrow. She purses her lips.

"You are unbelievable," she says. "You just all over here in Ida-nowhere, lyin' at me this whole time."

"Hey! I never lied to you," he insists. And if she were less riled up about the whole situation, she'd notice that he says it like that really means something to him, that he didn't. Well, she does notice. If she were less riled up she'd care.

"You didn't tell me, and you weren't gonna tell me, Michael! It's the same thing!"

Her own arms are crossed now.

"I actually thought we were friends," she continues. "But you know what friends don't do? Friends don't not tell friends that they got shrunk to the size of a Barbie doll and live inside a giant robot of themselves!"

That might be the most insane thing she's ever said in her life, but she absolutely believes it to be true.

"And how was I supposed to tell you, huh?" He asks, defensively.

"You just tell me! I woulda understood, Teavee. I exploded!" 

She has leaned forward to glare at him more forcefully, which has the added benefit of making his facial expressions easier to read as they flit across a face smaller than her own mouth.

First he looks like he doesn't believe her. Then: he looks like he wants very, very badly to believe her. Then he looks away, down at his own feet.

"Oh," he mumbles.

His arms are folded again, and he's slumped back against his stomach door. And she almost relents, because he does look miserable, but then she remembers:

"And you said Wonka. Like he was gonna send you something. Do you talk to Wonka?"

He shrugs and still won't meet her eyes.

"Sort of," he tells her. 

"How can you even sort of talk to the psycho who shrunk you?!?" 

It's less of a question; more of an accusation. It feels like the worst betrayal: that he's talking to _Wonka_ , of all people, behind her back.

He jabs a finger down at his robotic self.

"'Cause I need him to shrink stuff for me, and make this thing for me, so I can do anything, because I can't do _anything_!" He explodes.

Not like she had exploded all those years ago, but perilously close. His pasty face is flushed across his cheekbones and he takes shaky, unattractive breaths through his nose while his lips are pressed tight together.

"I said I liked you," he mutters, once his breathing has slowed. "I don't have...people that I like, and I way don't have people that like me. It's always been me, and my mom, and now it's even more...that, and then you...wanted to talk to me, and you didn't stop, and I didn't want you to. I didn't wanna mess it up. There's approximately zero good time to be like: by the way, I'm actually a way massiver freak than you think."

He has a little bit of a point. She hasn't told the whole story to anyone either. And it's not like she'd ever asked him point blank.

She jerks her chin at his fake body.

"Wonka made you that?" She asks, still a little crisply.

He looks down at...himself.

"Oompa Loompas, if we're gonna get technical about it," he says.

"Is it broke now?" She asks.

He sighs.

"No, the torque limiter was just always crap and sometimes the whole thing kernel panics on me."

She can feel her face go completely blank.

"...no," he says, more slowly. "I just have to reboot."

She leans in even closer, to peer into his stomach. It's pretty cramped: mostly full of wires, some of which are still attached to his bottom half, some of which are hooked into the gloves and helmet he has since removed, and some of which dangle free, waiting to be plugged into who knows what. There is also a sort of padded lounge chair, a tiny keyboard, and a screen that she can see is running...something. She sits back.

"Oh lord, they made you a video game," she says.

"Yup," he says, flatly.

That makes her raise an eyebrow.

"Why did I think you of all people would be more psyched about that?"

"Oh, I was at first," he tells her. "Figuring out how everything worked, and being able to, like, totally shut out the rest of the world if I wanted. I thought it was awesome. I thought it was _better_. But you know what turns out is a really boring video game if you have to play it for years? Your life. And it doesn't age, and it's not...the same. Like I get input if somebody touches me? But I don't 'feel' it. That's one of the things I thought would be better, but. Turns out: no. Don'ttouchme."

She had been extending an index finger cautiously towards his doll-sized chest. She brings her hand back to her lap.

"I wouldn't hurt you, you know," she says.

"You don't get how easy that'd be now," he tells her. "And I can't go to a doctor if something does happen. Wonka has to shrink any meds I gotta take, 'cause it turns out they don't make stuff in doses for people under a foot tall."

"Is he just gonna make you go around looking like you twelve forever? Why don't you make him make you a new...you?" She suggests.

His lips twitch.

"He, uh, did," Mike admits. "Almost. That's why we were at the airport that time: I had to go back so he could stick me in this scanner thing they made. Anyway: it might be done by the end of the month."

"It takes that long to make a Mike Teavee?" 

He smirks full out this time.

"You can't rush perfection," he says. "Plus, it's a Chocolate Factory: I'm not priority one. They made the first one really fast, but it looked fully robot-y, and my mom was all: 'He can't go outside like that!', and then this one took a couple months, and I guess they're making improvements. Whatever. Back when I was hacking your cam, I watched _you_ put on make-up for four hours once."

She laughs. And then she realizes what he has just said.

"You. Spied on me?"

His eyes dart from side to side.

"You know I did," he points out.

"I know you did that _once_ ," she says. "I didn't know you kept doin' it!"

She's leaning in on him again, and he holds up his hands defensively and cringes.

"It was just a couple of times, when you were already cam-ing, I didn't see anything private, I swear! Violet: please don't hit me with the hatch open, my mom once accidentally dislocated my shoulder trying to pass me the salt!" 

She doesn't sit back, but she doesn't advance on him further. She shouldn't believe him.

For some reason, she does.

"Better not've," she mutters. "And for your information, the only reason it took so long is I was filming a YouTube tutorial."

"...'kay," he says, lowering his hands slowly.

"You're the one who watched me put on make-up for four hours, which: _why_?"

"I had other tabs open," he insists, a little too quickly. "It was still the third most boring thing I've ever seen in my life."

Something beeps within his stomach cavity. He glances down.

"One sec," he says, ducking down inside his control panel. He pulls the door shut behind himself. She expects it to make a metallic clang, but it doesn't.

It takes longer than a sec. She's almost about to knock on his stomach door to make sure nothing has gone wrong, when his eyes fly open. The body on the floor in front of her goes immediately from a lifeless thing, to a seemingly flesh and blood boy.

Only it isn't right now. It moves fluidly, not at all like a machine as he sits up; pulls down his t-shirt. But it isn't Mike: not really. It's like a ghost: the Mike Teavee that once was. The real boy is somewhere deep inside, and she has trouble looking at his face instead of his stomach.

The eyes, she thinks, are not quite as blue as his real eyes are.

But she's probably imagining things. She slides off of his chair and sits on the floor next to him.

"Can I hit you now?" She asks.

He shrugs.

"Go for it."

She smacks him in the shoulder. He doesn't flinch. She smacks him again, harder.

"So, wait," she realizes. "You were just gonna Skype me one day and alla the sudden look sixteen?"

He shrugs again.

"Growth spurt?" He says.

Violet rolls her eyes.

"You seriously think I'm some dummy, don't you?"

"No," is all he says.

His phone buzzes from his desk. He hauls himself up to see who could be messaging him. She suspects it's a very limited number of people. Limited even more by the fact that she's currently speaking to him face to face. Sort of.

She pulls out her own phone to check the time, but nothing happens when she presses the home button. She must be out of juice somehow.

"You got a extra cable?" She asks. Which is silly of her, because of course he does. He grabs a portable battery out of a drawer and tosses it to her. He's frowning at his own phone.

She plugs the battery in. The black screen lights up with the less-than-ten-percent battery image. She places the phone on the floor beside her.

He's turned his attention back toward her, but his phone is still in his hands. He fiddles with it.

"You said please," she says.

"Huh?" He replies.

"You said please to me. You said thanks to your mom."

He raises an eyebrow. It's an oddly adult expression on his once again twelve year old looking face.

"Yeah," he says, sarcastically. "I'm a human being, with command of the English language and not a feral cat."

"I think actual twelve year old you mighta been a feral cat," she suggests.

"Actual twelve year old me was _twelve_ ," he points out. "Nobody says please or thank you when they're twelve. And being a jerk is basically your job."

"'Scuz you," she says. "Twelve year old me was precious."

"...uh-huh..."

"I will smack you again, Michael," she warns. "Don't think I won't." 

She cocks her head to the side.

"So. Wonka's gonna have to keep making new you's for you for life?" She asks.

"I guess," he shrugs.

"What are they gonna do with the old you's?"

"No clue," he admits. "Melt 'em, I hope. Nothing creepy I hope more."

"He can't make some other way to fix you?" 

_He fixed me,_ she thinks. She's pretty sure she was less than shrunk. As in: less physically left.

"He keeps saying he could put me in a taffy puller," Mike says. "I dunno if that's some sick joke, because: I am not getting in a freaking taffy puller. He says it a lot, though. Like, it may be his life's dream to put somebody, anybody, in a taffy puller."

"But, if it worked..." she says.

"How could it work?" He replies. "How could it possibly make me anything but even more messed up? There's no way it'd stretch me evenly all over. Like what about my nose? Hair doesn't stretch. I have internal organs I need to live."

Okay, when he puts it like that. But she can't help wondering...

Her phone suddenly buzzes to life. Check that: _blows up_. Oh god, there must be a hundred messages. All from the same number.

At the same time, Mrs. Teavee flings the door open.

"Violet Beauregarde," she says, "is there something you're not telling us? Because there is a very angry man outside of my house threatening to break down my door."

Violet is on her feet lightning fast.

"Ohhhhhhh noooooo," she gulps. "It's my daddy."


	5. five

Violet is considered a 'good' girl by basically all adults she encounters (with the exception of certain chocolatiers). A role model, even. She is entirely unused to being on the receiving end of the kind of look Mrs. Teavee is currently giving her.

"You came here without telling him???" Ethel gasps. One of her hands literally clutches at the pearl necklace around her throat.

Mike stares. And then, very slowly, Mike begins to clap.

"Nice," he snickers. "Seriously well done."

Violet and Ethel both turn to him and scold (in stereophonic unison):

"You are not helping!"

(Although Ethel adds a "Mister!" on the end of her admonishment.)

Mike stumbles backwards into the edge of his desk.

"N-never do that again," he stutters.

Violet turns her attention back to Ethel.

"I'm sorry, he just: he never would have let me," she tries to explain. It comes out pleading. Something about having disappointed Mrs. Teavee makes her feel terrible, which is utterly silly. The woman is probably used to being disappointed.

"Well that is your father's decision to make, young lady," Mrs. Teavee says, in what is probably her teacher voice.

"But it's the wrong one!" Violet insists. "It's stupid to come all the way here, and not see somebody I know just 'cause he's a boy. I am fifteen. I should be able to talk to a boy I like. ...as a friend."

That last bit came out surprisingly unconvincing and she has no idea why she felt she had to tack it on in the first place. Ethel stares at her. All parents are prepared for the eventuality that someone will, someday, develop a crush on their little boy or girl, but Ethel had pushed that eventuality fairly far away even before her little boy became more little than boy. She sighs deeply.

"I suppose," Mrs. Teavee says, "what's done is done."

Violet gets the sense the woman is used to saying that, too.

"So...what'm I gonna do?" She asks, anxiously. If there is a way out of this mess, she certainly can't see it.

Mike, who has been staring at a seemingly random bit of wall, shrugs suddenly, and begins to amble towards his door.

"Obviously we're gonna let him in," he says. As if it's that simple. As if Eugene will listen and respond to normal, human words at this point.

"Uh, we let my daddy in, and what he does gonna make what Wonka did to us look like a nice stroll through a park," Violet warns.

Mike rolls his eyes.

"No, it's not," he says. "Trust me. Just give me a couple minutes, and then let him in."

He walks past both of them, and Violet and his mother are left with no other choice than to follow.

Which is why, a few minutes later, Violet and Mike's mother are anxiously gathered in the entry way. Mrs. Teavee takes the bullet; opens the door.

"Mr. Beauregarde," she says, with the same strained fake enthusiasm she used to greet Violet. "I am _sure_ the kids did not mean to leave you out of the loop, but you know what kids are like, they just get so excit-..."

Eugene barrels past her.

"VIOLET BEAUREGARDE. YOU ARE," he bellows, "IN ALL OF THE TROUBLE. I DON'T WANT TO HEAR EXCUSES, AND I DON'T CARE IF THAT BOY PUT YOU UP TO IT, AND IF YOU THINK FOR ONE MOMENT YOU WILL EVER BE UNGROUNDED AGAIN-..."

"HEY! VIOLET'S DAD."

Eugene is cut off by the unexpected sound of...a child's voice, high pitched and prepubescent. And Mrs. Teavee (to his limited knowledge) has only the one, teenage son. 

"Down here," the little boy continues. Eugene follows the sound. Looks past Mrs. Teavee into the kitchen. Looks down, at the surface of the kitchen table.

There is a miniature Mike Teavee standing there, arms folded.

Eugene draws closer. Yes, a miniature Mike Teavee. Not a trick. Not an illusion.

Eugene has seen things in the entertainment industry. Things that do not bear repeating. And he certainly saw things at Wonka's factory, as short as his time there was.

Eugene has never seen anything like this. 

"Shrunk," he says (unknowingly echoing his daughter).

"Uh-huh," the boy says, flatly.

"Wonka?" Eugene asks, glancing away from the boy, and at Ethel Teavee.

"Uh-huh," Mike, his mother, and Violet all say, at more or less once.

"...Huh," Eugene mutters.

Because Eugene is the father of a teenage girl, and Eugene was, once upon a time, a teenage boy himself. And while some of his anger had been fueled by Violet's disobedience, more of it had been fueled by fear, and by the thought of certain... _scenarios_.

The sight of Mike Teavee deflates Eugene Beauregarde's anger like a popped bubble of Hubba Bubba, because there's nothing an eleven inch tall boy can do to his teenage daughter. 

"Huh," he repeats.

"Did you drive here?" Mrs. Teavee asks.

"Uh, no, I took a cab," Mr. Beauregarde answers, still looking down at Mike, who is holding his gaze defiantly.

"Why don't I get you a drink then," Ethel suggests.

Eugene, who has just caught sight of what, to him, appears to be a child-sized mannequin with a door in its stomach, and does not appear to know how to react, readily agrees:

"Yeah, I think I'm gonna need that."

Ethel ushers him into the be-pineapple-ed living room, where the bar lives and she does some of her finest work. Violet edges closer to Mike, who is carefully reinserting himself into his own stomach. 

"Oh my god I think we got away with it," she murmurs.

"You got away with it," he corrects.

With no need to reboot, Mike is full-sized and active again the moment the door in his stomach is closed.

"I didn't know you didn't tell him either," he points out.

He recounts how he told his own mother, and Violet is not surprised, exactly, because Mrs. Teavee had clearly been expecting her, but she does begin to think Mike's relationship with his mother is both more and less complicated than she had thought.

That seems to be the case with all of Mike's relationships. He's eyeing her critically.

"You really wanted to see me," he says, like he has been struggling with, but has finally accepted the idea.

"I said I liked you," Violet reminds him. Because she gets the feeling that even though he would never in a million years ask her to say so, it's something he likes hearing.

"You could have just kept liking me online," Mike insists.

That's true, in a very technical way, and not true in another way that Violet has trouble putting into words. 

"Look," she admits. "When we first started talkin', okay, a lotta it was..."

She tries to phrase it in a way that doesn't sound...

"...you were, like, a challenge."

She winces a little, because even that isn't right. It makes it sound like she was toying with him.

To her relief he just gives a one-shouldered shrug and says:

"I've definitely been called 'challenging' before. Among other things." 

She quickly pushes forward, before she loses her words.

(Her nerve?)

"But then you were just _you_ , and I dunno when that happened, but it did, and you...I..."

But that's all she has. She trails off, staring at him. Down at him. He looks so twelve again. Her silence hangs awkwardly between them, until he saves her by saying:

"Wonka sent me a message. The new thing is done."

Violet's voice is back, thank goodness.

"Does he...is he gonna like ship...you?" she asks.

Mike shakes his head.

"Pick up only," he says.

"So you gotta go back," Violet states. 

Her throat is dry. Something claws at it from the inside; at her chest. It is fear, she realizes. Dread. She swallows hard, like piece of gum is stuck in her throat.

"It's not like the tour," he tells her. "We go in the back door. I go straight to testing. One time Wonka didn't even show up."

Morbid curiosity has the better of her.

"How many times you been?" She asks.

"Uh. Four? Not counting the tour," he tells her. "To scan me, and then to try this on-"

He pokes himself in the chin with his index finger.

"-and then this last time they had to re-scan me twice because I grew after the first one. It's seriously not a big deal."

Violet realizes he has said this, because she has shuddered.

"I didn't say I thought it was," she protests. And too much, because a smirk begins at the edge of Mike's mouth.

"You should come with, then," he suggests.

"Uh, no!" She yelps, immediately.

"Scared?" Mike doesn't ask, so much as accuse, still smirking maddeningly.

" _No_ ," she sniffs. 

(She is.)

"I...why would Wonka even say yes to that anyway," she points out.

"Well, if we've learned anything here today, it's that if you don't ask, they can't say no," Mike says. "But he wouldn't anyway. Wonka's not like...I dunno, I just feel like he wouldn't. Say no. And also like if you just showed up he would be expecting you. But you would probably have to ask your dad about this one."

She does not consider it. Not even a little bit.

"It's really okay?" she asks.

"Yeah," he tells her. "Nobody sings anything. Nothing hits you in the head. Sometimes Bucket is around. He's fine, like I said, still a total goody-two-shoes, but you gotta do you if that's you, I guess. His mom is nice."

(It had been only months after the tour. Mrs. Bucket had come to the reception room in search of her son. Mrs. Bucket had clearly still not been completely at ease in the factory that was now her home through no real choice of her own.

She had glanced over and had been startled to see what she thought was a rodent move on Mr. Wonka's desk.

She had been horrified to realize after a moment, that it was not a rodent at all, but a boy. 

But she had not been horrified of the boy himself. He was, after all, around her own son's age (even if far far smaller), and strangely familiar. And so even after he had turned towards her, glared, and shrieked:

"What, lady? Why don't you take a picture? It'll last longer."

She had gently approached the desk that the boy was angrily kicking things off of, crouched down so that she was at eye level with him, and softly said:

"Hello."

The boy's expression had clearly said he was not expecting that and that he also had no idea what she wanted him to say in return. Possibly that the entire concept of a polite greeting was foreign to him.

"Are you alright?" She'd asked him, anyway.

"No I'm not alright!" He'd shrieked back, preparing to dart away from her. "Don't pick me up!"

"I won't," she'd assured him, holding up her hands so he could see them, careful to keep her voice quiet and calm. "I'm...Charlie's mother."

The boy had look confused, and she'd supposed perhaps he had assumed Charlie did not have parents at all. He would not have been the first.

"Okay..." the doll-sized boy had muttered.

"Are you," she had asked, as carefully as possible, "an Oompa Loompa?"

His tiny face had darkened and his fists had balled.

"No I'm not a stupid Oompa Loompa! I'm a kid, and stupid Wonka stupid shrunk me!!!"

Her son and father had not _entirely_ told her everything that occurred on Wonka's tour.

Mike Teavee had been more than happy to.

Although happy is not the correct word.

And if, by the end of their conversation, he had been sitting with his tiny knees pulled up to his tiny chest in a shrunken miserable ball with a sniffly nose and damp cheeks, no one will ever know, because Mrs. Bucket keeps her promises, and Mrs. Bucket had promised never to tell a soul.) 

"She totally reamed Wonka for messing us all up. I seriously thought he was gonna cry. Also, I don't usually like old people, but his one grandpa does have a never ending supply of stories about people dying in pretty terrible ways. And his other grandpa is basically the worst, most pessimistic jerk I've ever met. He has taught me so much."

It all sounds so...normal.

Mike clears his throat.

"Anyway. I just thought you should know that."

That soon his outside will match his...inside outside.

"Well that's good," she says. "Isn't it?"

She remembers how he had frowned at his phone. Mike's brow furrows.

"It's good. It's weird, 'cause he didn't say anything about the taffy puller this time. He always says something about it. And maybe he forgot? But I don't think he does that. He's already weird, and when he does something that's weird even for him? ...Like I said: it's weird."

"Don't you hate him?" Violet finds herself asking.

Mike blinks.

"...no. I don't like him, and he's super annoying, but he's not as stupid as I thought. Do you hate him?"

"...no," Violet agrees, after a moment of thought.

No. She fears him.

Her father and Mrs. Teavee appear in the kitchen doorway. Euegene looks considerably less shell-shocked and maybe a little embarrassed by his own behavior. Mrs. Teavee looks...the usual.

"We should hit the road, Duchess, early flight tomorrow," Euegene says. "Mrs. Teavee: thank you for the drink and, uh, enlightening conversation."

Violet reluctantly eases towards her father, even while protesting:

"It's not that early..."

"It's early enough," Eugene says. "And we gotta get out of these nice people's hair."

"Michael really does need to take that shower," Ethel announces.

Mike, who has been checking something on his phone, throws up his hands in dismay.

"It's been days!" Ethel says.

"Mom! Seriously, you are killing me," Mike groans.

"Mike: listen to yo' mamma and take a shower," Violet tells him. 

Mike points at her and his mother in turn.

"Okay, it is _not_ fair to gang up on me. There are two of you!"

Behind her, Violet can hear her father chuckle and say something under his breath that she can't quite understand, but almost sounds like _best get used to it, boy_.

Her own good-bye to Mike is a simple: "I'll talk to you later?" To which he replies: "Sure." And then she follows her father out into the Idaho cold and a warm cab. She sits beside him in the back seat and watches Mike's neighborhood fly away.

"Vi," Euegene begins, awkwardly but gently. "You coulda told me you were friends with that boy. I wouldn't have been angry with you. I'm not saying I would have understood, but I wouldn't have been angry. I thought you knew that. That you could talk to me about anything."

"I do," Violet admits, meekly. "But I don't...wanna talk to you about everything. You're always gonna be my daddy, but some stuff...some stuff is for us, and some stuff is for me, you know?"

Euegene looks stunned, then thoughtful.

She gets a text from Mike later that night.

_i wasn't kidding about asking your dad. & not just 'cause it'll be less lame with you there. a therapist would say u probably need to. i'm just gonna say i think u should think about it_

She is grounded, after all, but only for a week.


	6. six

She must have lost her dang mind.

The familiar gates loom ahead of her, and beyond them the familiar factory. Mike and his mother continue towards them, but Violet's own knees have stopped working.

Eugene had been surprisingly open to the idea of coming here.

Well. At first he had said:

"No. Absolutely not, Violet, I am not letting that lunatic anywhere near you ever again!" 

But it had been a knee-jerk reaction and she had been expecting it, and after giving him a hot minute to calm down, she had explained herself. He had listened. Since Idaho, it has felt like he's gotten better at that. She hadn't thought he was bad at it before, but she's been beginning to realize that there have been a lot of times her daddy has talked for her, when she is perfectly capable of speaking, mouthful of gum or not.

It's funny, what had finally swayed him: admitting that she was afraid. She doesn't want to spend her life afraid. She doesn't want to spend her life cracking her gum and keeping her head carefully empty. She's better than that.

And maybe she'd rehearsed the speech a couple of times in front of her mirror, but it had worked. And it had turned out her daddy was afraid too, which had initially shocked her, because daddies aren't supposed to be afraid of anything. But it turns out losing a child is a parent's worst fear, and Eugene does not have to say that he has lost her once; he cannot lose her again for her to know that he is thinking those exact words. 

What he does say is that he blames himself, and that's another shocker, because Violet has never once blamed him. He didn't put that gum in her mouth. But apparently Eugene has been spending the last three years thinking about how he could have stopped her. How he should have stopped her.

There had been a lot of hugging that night. In the end, it had been her choice.

She can't believe she chose this.

"You don't have to do this, if you don't want," her daddy reminds her, looking as wary of the gates as she feels.

But Mike looks over the shoulder of his carefully constructed twelve-year-old body at her, and she does.

(It is the night before they are due at the factory, and they are all at the same hotel, rooms on the same floor. She and her father have more than enough miles to cover a trip and accommodations like this. She gets the feeling Mike does something only this side of legal to cover their costs, and that Ethel doesn't quite disapprove.

She knocks on his door after dinner. Her father is in the know this time.

Mike and his mother had not joined them at the restaurant, and it occurs to her that he can't really eat in that thing. She wonders how he does. Does Ethel cut him up little doll-sized sandwiches, and the crushed potato chips at the bottom of the bag, and thimbles full of soda? Does he have a plastic Barbie brand dishes and utensils play-set?

Ethel lets her in. Mrs. Teavee is dressed in a robe, slippers, and is in the middle of elaborately setting her hair, which is a thing Violet understands. Unlike Violet and her father, the Teavees do not have separate, adjoining rooms, but they do have a separate bedroom and small living room, where Mike is sprawled on the already folded out fold-out couch.

"I'm going to bed soon, but he'll be up all night," Mrs. Teavee warns, before retreating to the bedroom to apply more curlers.

Violet hesitates for only a moment, before crawling into bed next to Mike. It isn't a bed anyway, she rationalizes, it's a couch, and there is an entire robotic body between them.

She's more appropriately dressed for it than he is anyway, having changed into a pair of purple lounge pants and a blue tank top. Mike is still fully dressed. Mike is still wearing sneakers. She left her own flip flops on the floor. Her mani and pedi match, and are frankly sparkly masterpieces. She doubts he notices.

He turns his head to look at her; places his phone face down on his own chest. She stretches out on her side, propping up her chin on one hand.

"You sleep in that thing?" She asks.

"Sometimes," he admits. "S'just easier."

Her eyes wander down to his stomach.

"You all kinda crammed in there though," she points out.

"Oh, wow, really? I had no idea what my life had been like for the past three years. Thanks for telling me," he says, sarcastically.

"Don't you sass me," Violet warns. "I will verbally whup you so hard, you will have actual bruises. You gonna sleep in there tonight?"

"I...dunno," he says, eyeing her. Ethel probably never spanked him. Ethel definitely, in Violet's opinion, should have spanked him. "Probably."

"That's kinda silly. You got this whole huge bed," she tells him. "You could sleep on one pillow."

"Yeah, but it makes it hard to text," he admits. "Not totally impossible, it just takes forever."

She remembers some of his frustratingly slow text responses early on. They make a lot more sense now. 

She frowns, suddenly.

"You text a lotta other people?" She asks. "Like, other girls?"

His nose wrinkles.

"No," he says.

"'Cause I don't," she tells him. "Text other boys. I text you more than my friends, even. We talk, like, every night."

"Yeah..." he agrees, although he doesn't sound like he gets it. There is definitely an it to get.

"And I didn't know if you were also talkin' to somebody else," she finishes, a little lamely.

He shakes his head.

"No. Just you," he says, like it should be obvious.

He's completely oblivious.

"And you don't think I'm dumb, right?" She asks, smoothing out a wrinkle in one of the pillow cases.

"No," he says. "If I thought you were dumb, you would know it, because I would have told you a bunch of times, and then never spoken to you again."

That seems...accurate.

"It's just that sometimes people think I am. Or...I dunno," she tries and fails to explain. He's just watching her, fingers drumming on his phone case, so she tries again. 

"Like sometimes people will say I'm not a real model, 'cause I don't wear a size two."

She's not sure why she's telling a sixteen year old who definitely still has to get his clothes in the children's department. Mike just shrugs.

"Well, they're wrong. Your face is all over stuff, a bunch of companies pay you to model. That literally makes you a model. It doesn't matter what size you wear." 

He pauses for a moment, before adding:

"And...people probably think you can't be smart, because you're pretty."

A slow, sly grin spreads over her face.

"Oh," she says. "You think I'm prettyyyyyyyyyyyy?"

Mike rolls his eyes.

"Don't do that. You know you're pretty."

"Yeah," she agrees. "I do know that about me. But I don't mind you admitting this undeniable, universal truth." 

She glances at him out of the corner of her eye.

"You pretty cute too," she says. "I mean: like you woulda been. The actual you. I'm not perving on your lil' twelve year old... You, really you, is good looking. In that weird skinny white boy way."

His face is completely blank.

"Did you just glitch out on me again," she asks, snapping her fingers in front of his eyes. His head jerks back. He picks up his phone and starts scrolling through it like his life depends on it.

"No. Uh. Great. Thanks. I'm, like, the size of one of your feet," he mutters.

"Um, my feet are dainty," Violet insists, feeling the need for a quick subject change. "So you really never even thought about letting Wonka try an' fix you for real? Even if he does wanna use a taffy puller?"

"No," he says.

She waits for it.

"...yeah," he admits. He's staring hard at his phone, but he isn't scrolling anymore. "I think about it a lot. All the stuff I can't do now that I just totally took for granted before. All the stuff I'm never gonna get to do. Like I used to think it was the most embarrassing thing in the world, but now...like all I wanna do some days is hug my mom. Actually hug her. I could hug her like this, but it'd just be fake. Everything I do is just something I'm watching on a screen. None of it is real."

His arms flop to his sides and he stares up at the ceiling.

"But even if that's all I've got, at least it's something. Like if I let him try, and I get even more messed up, and I lose everything..."

"You wouldn't lose me," she tells him. His eyes dart towards her. 

"Whatever he did to me: it worked," she continues. "You really think after all this time, after he's done all this stuff to help you, that he'd just go and mess you up worse?"

Mike sits up; frowns.

"I mean, I wanna say no. Not on purpose. But I dunno if he knows what'd happen, you know? Like, I think he knew they'd mess up her up, but I don't think he expected his squirrels to tear Veruca Salt's arms and legs off and stuff," he tells her.

"But it's more of a chance than none," she points out.

"I know," he admits, laying back again.

"And whatever you do: if you do, or you don't, or whatever happens, I'm not goin' anywhere, got it?" She declares. "An' if he does try anything on you, I will slap that top hat right off Wonka's face."

He grins at that.

"I would pay so much money to see that happen," he says.

"I thought you didn't hate the guy," she recalls.

"I don't," he says. "But something about seeing him get owned would still be pretty sweet."

She can see the time on the phone in his hand. It's getting late. No matter how comfortable this is, she can't stay here. That would be pushing her daddy too far. She stretches and gets to her feet; finds her flip flops.

"Anyway, like I said: whatever happens," she reminds him.

She's almost to the door, when it hits her, and she spins back towards him.

"SQUIRRELS DID WHAT NOW???"

It's another forty-five minutes before she's back in her room and questioning her own judgement.

But the next morning she wakes up to a text from Mike that says:

_i think i'm gonna_

There is no turning back.)

She forces her feet to move. As reported, they enter through a door that does not require them to nearly fall to their deaths. Which is nice.

Violet is not prepared to be suddenly and overwhelmingly face to face with Wonka.

She is.

"Teavees. Do come in," the chocolatier says. The man has not changed a bit: not even his garish outfit. His pants are still the same green plaid, his jacket that particular shade of purple velvet. His top hat rests jauntily on his head. She had not noticed when she was twelve, but she thinks he might be wearing heels. Lifts at the very least.

"And Violet Beauregarde," he continues. Something in Wonka's eyes gleams in a very disconcerting way, and it's all she can do to keep herself from taking a step back. Wonka turns his attention to Mike.

"How interesting. ...No, strike that: reverse it. I'm afraid this will have to be a particularly brief reunion: time does not grow on trees, after all. So. Let's pop you in you, and get you all out of my hair."

Mike has his chin jutted out defiantly. It looks silly when one has a twelve year old chin.

"That's it?" He asks. "What, did you finally find somebody else to put in your taffy puller? Did you rip an Oompa in half?"

"I'm sure I didn't, and I'm sure I haven't the slightest idea what you mean," Wonka sniffs, straightening his cuffs for no reason. The man is such a liar. It's enough to push down the fear bubbling up from her stomach.

"Hey. He said you been sayin' you could fix him in a taffy puller," Violet snaps. "Is that bull or what?"

Wonka is looking at her again with that gleam in his eyes. Like he knows something she doesn't know. Something she doesn't want to know. Something he can't wait for her to know she doesn't want to know.

"Oh yes," Wonka says, almost offhandedly. "I suppose I might have said something of that sort. You see, small boys are extremely springy and elastic. Yes, I believe I could have easily stretched a twelve year old back to a reasonable size. But you...are not twelve years old any longer, are you young Mister Teavee? I can't say I'm as confident of the results on a sixteen year old."

"You never said," Mike protests, "that there was a time limit on it! And you've been saying it for three years!"

"And you never said yes," Wonka replies. "So the point was moot. Unless...your answer has changed?"

"Michael, you can't be serious!" Mrs. Teavee shrieks. "Mr. Wonka, I'm so sorry. Don't listen to him, he has...puberty."

"An unfortunate side effect of aging, I've been lead to believe Mrs. T., however-..."

Wonka has crept closer to Mike; looms over him. He taps his cane against Mike's false chest.

"Just as it was ultimately his choice that landed him in his current predicament, this too is a decision that only Mike alone can make. Is he still so content to sit and watch the world through a screen? Or is he willing to take a chance on something which may not be as easy, but may in the end be more rewarding? ...If, of course, he hasn't developed crippling agoraphobia in there. Terrible disease. Just awful."

He grins down at Mike, who is glaring at him.

"Just do it," Mike practically growls.

Wonka's grin widens.

"That settles that," Wonka says, cheerfully. "To the taffy room it is."

"Michael, no!" Ethel wails. She grabs for his shoulder desperately. "You can't do this, Michael, you-"

"Mom," Mike says, softly.

An unspoken conversation seems to go on between them, and Mrs. Teavee's hands eventually return to her sides. She closes her eyes.

"Please," she says. "Just don't hurt my little boy."

"Mrs. Teavee," Wonka says, gently. "...I assure you, I won't feel a thing. Now, if no one else has anything to declare...?"

He starts to usher Mike towards an unmarked door. It's now or never.

"Wait!" Violet demands.

She marches over to the pair of them; shoulders herself in front of Wonka so she is almost toe to fake toe with Mike, and approximately eye to eye with his bangs. He looks up at her.

"What?" He asks.

She places her hands on her hips.

"You're my boyfriend now, okay?" She tells him. It is not a question.

His mouth hangs open.

"Uh," he says. "...okay?"

Wonka slides past her and leads Mike away, looking slightly perturbed that she has overshadowed his grand exit. She turns back to her father and Mrs. Teavee, who are also standing, mouths open, eyebrows in hairlines, staring at her in moderate to extreme disbelief.

"What?" Violet says. "Sometimes that's how you gotta do it."


	7. seven

There are no chairs in the room where Wonka has left them. It is something Violet, her father, and Mrs. Teavee all realize quickly, and at nearly the same time. It is something, Violet suspects, that Wonka has done intentionally. Discomfort by design.

She leans her shoulders back against a wall; folds her arms across her chest. She tries not to look nervous, something Mrs. Teavee is failing at spectacularly as she jiggles one foot, then the other, then digs through her purse for something, then decides to stay sober for possibly the first time in her life.

"Vi. Uh," her father says, breaking the silence that has settled in the room. "You can't just...tell a boy he's your boyfriend."

"Ha!" Ethel barks, before Violet can argue. "Please. You and I both know: teenage boys (even my son who is a certifiable genius) are about as smart as a cardboard box when it comes to girls. It could have taken him years to figure it out on his own. You did the right thing, honey."

Eugene snorts.

"Certifiable somethin'," he mutters.

"Your daughter exploded!" Ethel snaps, before slapping a hand over her mouth, and sinking to the ground where she sits, cross-legged and looks like she is mentally resigning herself to the planning of Mike's funeral. 

She looks like Mike when she sits like that: they have the same posture. They have the same long, thin neck, and long, thin fingers. 

Violet sits very gently next to her, lest the woman shatter into millions of tiny particles. 

"He's gonna be okay," Violet says, and manages to sound more sure than she feels. Now that they're here, and that Mike isn't, she isn't sure at all, actually. And if it does go wrong, won't that be her fault, at least a little bit? On the one hand: she didn't talk him into it. She didn't _push_. On the other hand: didn't she? She doesn't know anymore. She had only wanted to help.

Or had she been being selfish? Before she came along, Mike had been...if not totally happy, happy enough. Dealing. And then she had gone and brought it all up, more than once, and why?

Because she likes him. She wants to be able to like the real him. That's selfish. He should have been good enough the way he was; whatever way he was going to be.

He is good enough. Was. Will be. It's just...she _likes_ him. How could she not wish?

And she remembers their conversation back in the hotel room: he wants real too; has wanted it for a while now. She wonders if any part of him wants it more now because of her.

He has to like her too, doesn't he? Like, in _that_ way. They talk, like, _all the time_. He watched her on her cam for hours once. He said she was pretty. That has to count for something.

Plus, it only makes sense that someone would have a crush on her. She's practically a goddess.

Mike makes way less sense. Mike is weird and socially stunted (as well as literally stunted). But the feelings are there, completely undeniable, and she's not even sure when they actually started. Probably way earlier than she'd ever admit to herself. It's different, too, from other crushes she's had before. And he's pretty far from the chiseled pretty boys she's squealed over with her squad. She's definitely into his...brain? That sounds gross. But there's a way Mike Teavee thinks that isn't like how other people think, at least not anybody she knows, and she likes that. She likes the way it makes her think. She does think he's cute, though. That wasn't a lie. Even if he is a skinny, snow white, shrunken suburban shut-in from potato land.

She can already hear every single one of her friends calling her crazy. Maybe she is crazy. Boys are completely confusing.

Wonka reappears suddenly, swinging his cane and whistling a tune that is inappropriately jaunty for the situation. It also hasn't been nearly long enough to stretch an entire boy in a taffy puller, in Violet's opinion. That seems like it would take some time. Particularly if you aim to do it right.

Beside her, Mrs. Teavee leaps to her feet. She is surprisingly agile for an alcoholic wearing a crinoline.

"It didn't work," she says, just as quickly. "Did it? Is he alright? ...Is he dead?"

She crowds Wonka, who seems to be thrilled by her distress.

"Now now," Wonka insists. "One at a time."

Violet rolls her eyes. Out of the corner of said roll, she can see her father do the same. Mrs. Teavee is clearly only one person, with a legitimate reason to be utterly shook.

"Did you stretch him or not?" Violet demands.

"Not," Wonka says, simply.

There's a moment of shocked silence, as the three of them stare at him, and wonder what the point of _any_ of this has even been. Wonka bursts into laughter.

"You...you should see all of your faces," he gasps between giggles. "A boy in a taffy puller. Can you imagine? He'd be entirely disproportionate. Far too thin. And hair doesn't stretch at all. Oh no. It would have been a complete disaster."

"So where _is_ he?" Mrs. Teavee shrieks, and Violet wants to shriek the same thing, honestly. Instead she accuses:

"You liar. You said you could fix him. You been sayin' you could fix him this whole time, and you couldn't even. You were just messing with him. You're just... _mean_!"

Wonka looks genuinely surprised; genuinely...hurt. Genuinely almost like a normal human being in a top hat. She hadn't thought he was capable of that.

"Wow. Hurtful," he says. "Also I will have you know, I absolutely did fix him, so there." 

"Uh," Eugene begins. "So. Wait. You didn't put him in a taffy puller, but you did fix him? I'm just tryin' to keep up here."

Wonka turns towards him.

"Yes, Mr. Beauregarde. You see, what I did, was put him back into the Chocolate Television-..."

Mrs. Teavee gasps and swoons, and Violet just manages to catch her. Luckily, she's a slight woman.

"...and I just put a really big screen at the other end. So simple. Did you honestly think I would put a boy in a taffy puller? Something is mentally wrong with all of you." 

"So. Where. Is he???" Mrs. Teavee yells, like a wounded animal.

"I believe Mrs. Bucket is just helping him find some pants," replies Wonka, looking vaguely concerned for the woman. But only vaguely.

There's a noise behind them. A shuffle of feet: two pairs. One pair wears sensible ballet flats. The other wears socks, but no shoes.

"Mom?"

Mrs. Teavee is out of her arms like a rocket, and Violet turns on her own heel so fast she almost twists an ankle. Even Eugene cranes his neck to see what's going on. Only Wonka stays exactly where he is and looks pleased with himself.

It's funny, because the voice that has spoken isn't even Mike's voice: not in a way that any of them have heard it before. It's a sixteen year old boy's voice. And it is coming out of the mouth of a sixteen year old boy.

But it still sounds like Mike, somehow. And Mike still looks like Mike. He's standing next to a kind-faced woman with mousy brown hair, and he's the miniature teenager Violet saw in Idaho, now in life-size.

He's still pale. And skinny. And gangly. He's only a little taller than she is, so not very tall for a boy at all. His face is a little goofy. His hair is ridiculous. 

And he's real. A flesh-and-blood, actual Mike, not a plastic and silicon facsimile. The kind-faced woman smiles, and touches his arm gently, and he grins back at her and rubs the spot where she has touched with a hand after she takes her own hand away. 

Violet has to force her feet to stay in place, because as much as she wants to rush to him, his mother is here, and she has dibs.

Ethel overwhelms him completely, touching his face, his shoulders, his chest. The woman is shaking.

"Oh! Mikey-...ael! Michael! You're...you! My little boy is so grown up!" 

Mike, to his credit, puts up with most of it, and looks only slightly humiliated.

"Okay," he says. "Okay. Mom. Mom? I'm fine. It's-...oof."

Ethel has wrapped her arms around him and crushed him to her chest. He's a little bit taller than she is too, so Violet watches as he spits out a mouthful of hair. He looks uncomfortable, but he doesn't pull away until she does. Even when she does, Ethel can't seem to stop staring at him.

Violet doesn't move. He hasn't looked at her yet.

And maybe he won't. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe she pushed too hard, and he just said yes because he didn't know what else to say; didn't know how to say no. Maybe he'll avoid her now that he's normal again, and any girl out there will talk to him like he's just a guy. Maybe this is about to get real, _real_ awkward.

And then he looks at her. His blue, blue eyes lock on hers and something coils in her stomach, because they're bright, and warm, and cocky all at once, and fixed on her, and he doesn't look away. Her feet are still rooted in place. She isn't sure if she's supposed to go to him, or if he's supposed to come over. They don't cover this kind of thing in Teen Vogue or on The CW.

Mrs. Teavee has turned from her son, and is approaching Wonka. Violet takes that as her cue, and makes her way over to Mike.

For the first time, she has to look up at him. A grin tugs at her lips. The corner of his lips twitches into a grin of his own.

"Hey," she says.

"Hey," he replies.

And it's cool.

Mrs. Teavee has made it to the chocolatier now.

"Mr. Wonka," she asks, calmly. "When exactly did you realize you could fix my son like that?"

Violet's brow wrinkles. She turns her head in Wonka's direction.

"Yeah...when did you know that?" She asks as well.

"Oh, I've always known," Wonka admits, still pleased with himself. "But it just seemed so anti-climactic."

Violet's lips press into a hard, straight line. Her eyes narrow into slits.

"I'ma smack his hat off," she tells Mike.

But she's too late, and it appears that Mike's mother has dibs again, as Ethel is more or less assaulting Wonka with her handbag, swinging the accessory with impressive force and smacking the man in the shoulder and back as hard as she can.

"You!" She screeches, punctuating each word with a whack. "Chocolate! Cretin! Do you! Have! Any! Idea! What! The last! Three! Years! Of our lives! Have been like!?!?"

Wonka cringes away from her.

"Ow. Ow!" He whines. "Why is your purse so sharp? Is that Bakelite? Ow!"

"Wow," Violet says, blinking in awe. "Your mom is stronger than she looks."

"She's on, like, an old lady soft-ball team. They crush it," Mike tells her. "She also used to do roller derby." 

He looks away from the scene his mother is making, and back at Violet. 

"So," he says. "I'm your boyfriend now, huh?"

"Yup," she says. "And you already said okay. You can't take okay back."

"Wasn't gonna," he tells her. "Although...you _could_ have asked a little more romantically."

"Nope," Violet says.

Mike nods.

"Fair enough."

His arm moves. His hand brushes hers. His fingers slip between her fingers. His hand curls around her hand. It stays there. 

His hand is cold and bony, but she feels warm. _Good_. There are, Violet notices, goosebumps on his arm.

"You can touch people for real now, huh?" She says, even if that's blindingly obvious, because: he is. They are.

"Uh-huh," he agrees. "It's totally weird. Totally awesome."

He grins at her again. She's going to kiss him.

...But maybe not yet, because he suddenly asks:

"Question: is your dad gonna kill me?"

She's not sure what prompted that, until she realizes that her daddy has, in fact, moved to stand behind her, and that he is fixing Mike with a very stern, slightly crazy gaze.

Eugene points to his eyes, then to Mike, then to his own eyes again. Mike nods, slowly.

"Mmmhmm," Eugene replies.

Wonka, by this time, has stopped yelping. Mrs. Teavee is brushing some non-existent cocoa dust off of her purse. Wonka is attempting not to look like a kicked puppy.

"Well," he says, voice cracking a little. "Happy endings all around. So, so very, very happy. I can't tell you all what a... _pleasure_ it has been to see you again."

The chocolatier draws himself up straight and to his full height, and points dramatically to the left with his cane.

"Now get out!" 

Violet, her father, Mike, and his mother, all turn slowly to look at the blank wall Wonka is pointing at.

"...the door is, as it turns out, in the other direction," Wonka admits. "But I'm sure you all knew what I meant."

He doesn't have to say it twice.


	8. epilogue

Mike stands on the first step of the pool, ankle deep in water, and looks dubiously down at the second. His legs are so pale and so skinny in his swim trunks that Violet laughs out loud at him, and he splashes at her with his foot, sending her darting backwards to protect her hair.

They're in her backyard, in her pool. Mike doesn't know how to swim.

Back on dry land, her daddy and Mrs. Teavee sit on lounge chairs under umbrellas. Ethel is wearing a truly incomprehensible plaid one piece, and a pair of seriously glam white, cat's eye sunglasses that make Violet suspect she is not a completely lost cause, fashion-wise. She will guide that woman out of frump-town, even if she has to work within the parameters of a 1950's silhouette. Retro can be stylin'.

Mike has made it down another step, and the water is up to his knees now. It had been difficult to pry him out of his t-shirt, and Violet wonders if she shouldn't have just let him win that battle. Not because his chest is as skinny as his legs, but because despite a more than liberal application of sunscreen, he's still going pink on his shoulders and the tip of his nose. They can deal with it later.

Mike is adjusting pretty well to being a full-sized boy again. Mrs. Teavee is adjusting really well to having a full-sized son. Violet, in her own opinion (which is right), is winning at this long distance relationship thing. And her daddy...

Actually, he's fine. After his initial, and honestly pretty mild threat back at the factory, he's pretty much left them alone (as much as any reasonable parent leaves two dating teenagers alone).

("So. How is this gonna work?" Mike had asked, back at the hotel, after the factory. "'Cause: I still live in Idaho.")

And yeah, he does. They aren't moving any time soon. You don't pick up your whole life just because your son got himself a girlfriend. But (as she had pointed out then, too) they have kind of been dating for a while now, with the daily Skyping. They've just made it official. And a flight from L.A. to Boise (or vice versa) only takes about two hours (or three, with security and TSA pre-check) and costs a couple hundred bucks.

It's not ordinary, but they aren't ordinary. They're better than that.

That's not to say it's not without, like, _complications_. Like:

(It does not go well when she tells the squad, because first of all she has been keeping this from them and they don't appreciate that, and she also only has one snap of him to show them at the time. He looks particularly _Mike_ in it: spiky hair half crammed under a hat, face deathly pale with a cocky smirk, flashing a sideways peace sign in his all black room like some kind of hip-hop vampire. She could have made him send her something straight-on, in natural light, with hair that doesn't look like a bomb that has gone off, but that's not what Mike looks like. Mike looks like the picture of him that she has; that's why she likes it. That's why she keeps it on her phone.

Plus, he's not an actor or a singer or rich or famous for being related to someone famous or rich, so she's prepared for their polite silence when she texts them his photo, but she's a little pissed when, two weeks later, they stage an intervention and Krystal tells her she didn't have to go all the way to Idaho to find a white boy because they are literally everywhere. Krystal doesn't even have any kind of boy.

It's even worse when they meet him in person, because she can tell Mike feels like he's being judged, and he should, because they are, and he's laconic and sullen, until Madison's iPhone glitches.

"Why does it keep saying it doesn't have a SIM card," the girl whines to herself. "It's said that all day."

Mike plucks the phone out of her hands, pulls out his wallet chain that Violet knows by now is not attached to a wallet, sticks the end of a paper clip into the side of the phone, pops out a little tray, then pushes it back in.

"You should also update your iOS," Mike drawls, returning the assortment of tools he keeps chained to himself to his back pocket. And then looks a little frightened because Madison is looking at him like he has just saved a toddler from a burning building.

They get that he's smart after that, and he loosens up around them eventually, and they agree that he can be funny, but they're never going to get _him_. That's fine. He's not theirs to get.)

And:

(He won't do a 'My boyfriend does my make-up' video, or a 'My boyfriend picks out my outfit', or like vlog with her anything. It's annoying, because those kinds of videos are the cheapest way to get tons of hits, which is exactly why he refuses. But she isn't mad.

She is a mad when some gossip rag snaps a photo of them holding hands at a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, and runs some fake story about two former Wonka ticket winners losing the grand chocolate prize, but winning at love, like Wonka set the whole thing up. Yeah, okay, she wouldn't have _met_ him if it hadn't been for the contest, but Wonka has zero to do with anything post-tour, except for maybe messing with Michael for like three years, which Mike is weirdly zen about. 

She is the most mad when she has to stop Mike from committing serious cyber crimes against the rag, reporter, and paparazzi, because she is not just going to sit by and let him get his dumb narrow behind thrown in jail, and this is a thing they're going to have to keep dealing with. People are going to take pictures of her, and if he's around he's going to end up in them.

...She can't say she's not secretly a little flattered by his reaction.)

And also:

("What?" Mike says, as her eyes travel down from the top of his hat-less head, to his tie (blue, to go with but not exactly match her dress, as requested), to the slim-cut suit trousers (that make him look like a male model despite his lack of model-esque height) that break perfectly over his...sneakers. 

Black Converse Chuck Taylor All Star sneakers at the end of school formal. 

"Michael," she says in that way she has of saying his name where she knows that's all she has to say.

"They're new," he insists. "I put black laces in. That's formal."

He's probably gonna wear those dang shoes to senior prom too.

...

Oh lord, he's probably gonna wear those dang shoes to their wedding.) 

And just in general sometimes Mike dresses like he tripped and fell into a Hot Topic and then proceeded to roll his way through the merchandise, but she knew that going in, and she endures it. It could be worse. He could be an L.A. guy in the L.A. guy uniform of basketball shorts and flip flops outside of basketball shorts and flip flop situations. And he's not a Hot Topic hot mess every day. She'll just have to...steer him, sometimes, when it's like...important.

(But when the time comes she'll leave him completely to his own devices and she'll end up with not a diamond, but a pearl ring with just a hint of a purple shimmer that will sit on her finger like a little perfect bubble, and it will be so _the thing_ she could slap him, but she won't slap him, she'll cry and say 'yes'.)

And she will grudgingly admit that she herself isn't without some...minor flaws.

So: 

(She almost chews him out in the middle of the mall in the middle of Idaho, when she catches him making what she thinks are eyes at the girl behind the counter at Claire's. The anger starts in the pit of her stomach, and bubbles up until it's heating her ears, because how how dare he? She's aware Mike is not always in tune with social graces, but even he should know you don't look at a girl when you're out with your girl. She doesn't look at other guys. And not to be mean, but Claire's girl has some seriously fried hair. But then Claire's girl moves and Mike's gaze doesn't, and Violet realizes he's not looking at another girl at all, but at a poster on the wall behind her advertising a selection of nose rings. It takes a few minutes of careful breathing to get the jealousy to subside.

And then later, at dinner, she and his mom have to gang up on him because he is _not_ getting a nose ring, no way, and Ethel's protests fall on mostly deaf ears, but her own pointed looks go a long way. She feels a little bad about it after. It's just, like, _a nose ring_...

She talks his mom into letting him get his ears pierced instead. She holds his hand while they do it, and pretends not to notice that he cries a little.

"You didn't say it was gonna hurt," he whines, when they have finished. But she does catch him checking himself out in pretty much any reflective surface and looking pleased with himself, which he doesn't always do.

He does look particularly cool. 

When the holes heal, they share earrings.)

And maybe also:

(They end up having their first fight about money.

She doesn't think of herself as rich because she knows other people who are _rich_. They just have a nice house, and a pool, and the disposable income to rent a hot air balloon if necessary. It's not a big deal.

The Teavees have a nice house too, but it's not as big. It's only about half as big. They don't have a pool. She doesn't read into it.

Long distance relationships are tough, though, and it kind of feels like she's always going to him, and one night, when she wants to see him, but she's stuck skyping him, she tells him she feels like he isn't trying as hard as she is.

And they fight about it.

And she shouldn't have said it in the first place, but she did, and she can't take it back, and he's all cagey again, like he was when they first started talking, but now it's not fun. It takes days of trying to break down his walls again, and apologies, which neither of them are good at. Violet is pretty sure she's wrecked everything, but eventually he admits he and his mom just don't always have an extra couple hundred bucks for a plane ticket.

And Violet realizes she has never not had an extra couple hundred bucks, for as long as she can remember.

"It's no big, I can just buy you a ticket whenever," she tells him.

But that's worse somehow, in a way she can never totally figure out. She just has to keep in mind that he has his pride as much as she does, and tread carefully.) 

And she can maybe, just all around, be an itty-bitty bit vain. The smallest possible amount. (And who could blame her?)

(But she doesn't try to make him change out of those dang sneakers before they walk down the aisle, because that's Mike, and Mike is what she signed up for.)

(But all of that's...a whole other story...)

Right now he's chest deep in water, the California sun bouncing off his pale Idaho skin, pushing his damp bangs out of his eyes. 

She tastes like gum, he's told her, when they kiss. He doesn't really taste like anything, except boy, which is nothing like gum. He's still only a little taller than she is, but she pushes herself up on her toes anyway and wraps her fingers around his narrow hips under the water. It's as much an excuse to touch him, as it is to keep her balance. He smirks against her lips before kissing her back.

And then a beach ball hits both of them in their faces.

Her daddy is standing at the edge of the pool.

"That was a warning shot," Eugene says. But he doesn't actually look angry. From behind her tiki drink Mrs. Teavee just mutters:

"Get a room."

(A whole house, eventually.)

Today they get towels, and lemonade (like, actual lemonade), and Mike lets his mother fuss over his very mild sunburn with a minimum of eye rolling, and then they go and sit on the other side of the pool, as far away from the adults as possible, because they are teenagers, and that's the teen way.

"Did you think I was pretty, all the way back on the tour?" She prompts, half teasingly, half not. They've climbed into one of the free standing hammocks that lives by the pool and fire pit area of her backyard. Their heads are at opposite ends, and their combined body weight weighs down the middle of the hammock enough that they can see each other easily. He has put his t-shirt back on, and she's wearing a sarong, but their legs are still bare, and pressed together. One of her arms is looped around one of his bony feet. Mike is growing into one of those boys whose shoes are boats and whose elbows could slice a grapefruit. Violet remains curvaceous and proud of it, thank you very much, rocking her bikini better than most size two's could hope to. She uses one of her own not-at-all-boat-sized feet to prod him in the side.

He gives her a look.

"I was twelve," he says.

Which both is and isn't an answer.

"I thought you were cool, though," he admits.

And she knows that from a twelve year old Mike Teavee, cool is a much higher compliment than pretty. 

"Did you think _I_ was pretty?" He sing-songs, making a duck face at her.

"Nope," she says, immediately and flatly.

He looks a little pouty, so she carefully reverses herself until their heads are side by side. She definitely doesn't come close to capsizing them both, at all, because she is grace personified.

"But you _were_ twelve," she points out.

"That's fair," he concedes. 

He'll have to go back to Idaho at the end of the weekend. If anything is imperfect, it's that. 

But it's a minor issue. A technicality. She'd have Idaho beat, even if it was a place he didn't think was lame, and she knows it. And that's not even her usual confidence talking; that's just straight truth.

She rests her chin on his shoulder.

Her father does not throw anything at them this time.

They take a selfie. Every hashtag is perfect, of course, but the reality is even better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's it! Sorry it took so long to wrap this one up: this last chapter was hard (probably because I enjoyed writing this 'verse so much I didn't want it to be over). Thanks to everyone who read & reviewed. I'm not saying I don't have any ideas for a sequel, but I do have a few other long CaTCF fics I'd like to get out first. I'm also writing drabbles and taking prompts here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12656286/chapters/28844610 just to keep myself sharp. And thanks again!


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